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Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:49:34 +0200
From: Manuel Collado <m.collado@fi.upm.es>
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Subject: Re: Avatox 1.1: Trouble with encoding in Windows
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Date: 2006-09-11T15:49:34+02:00
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Georg Bauhaus escribió:
> Manuel Collado wrote:
> 
>> 1. The ASIS API should provide a way to know the character encoding of
>> the source file (I think it doesn't).
> 
> Yes! This will help a lot in avoiding character set issues.
> And it might help prevent dodgy arguments like the ones presented
> by implementers against the clever requirement to write the
> identifier π in the Ada 2005 library. :-)

Spanish identifiers like 'tamaño' (size) or 'año' (year) are currently 
accepted by GNAT.

> 
> 
>> 2. The non-ASCII characters could be converted to XML character
>> references (&#nnn;) by Avatox.
> 
> This is beyond my comprehension, in particular when XML does
> have standardized character set support. Numeric character
> entities will force me to look at geographical names
> like España (Spain) or Łódź (in Poland)
> written  Espa&#xF1;a  and  &#x141;&#xF3;d&#x17A;
> respectively.

XML markup is meant to be written and read mostly by tools, not by humans. 
So it doesn't matter if a text fragment is coded as 'España' or as 
'Espa&#xF1;a'. In fact, after parsing, an XML processing agent cannot know 
how it was coded.

My suggestion is that the Avatox encoding issue can be solved by simply 
writing non-ASCII characters as XML character references just when the 
final XML output is generated.

> 
> Will any Ada programmer find it pleasing to even write them as
> character strings in this equivalent way?
> 
>    Country: Wide_String := "Espa" & Wide_Character'Val(241) & "a";
>    Town: Wide_String := (
>       Wide_Character'Val(16#141#),
>       Wide_Character'Val(16#F3#),
>       'd',
>       Wide_Character'Val(16#17A#));
> 
> You could then go on and recommend writing Ada in the following style,
> just because some text editing tool that you remember might not properly
> handle white space:
> 
>    Town: String := "New" & Character'Val(32) & "York";
> 

This is outside of scope. I've not spoken about adequate character 
representation in Ada sources, just in XML documents.


> <steam>
> If programmers don't start accepting that there are more
> characters than can be expressed in 7bin ASCII and start
> making less buggy text tools (including Ada tools)
> then anyone will continue to have difficulties in international
> communications.
> 
> I hope that ASIS is a chance to get this done.
> </>

Amen to that.

> 
> -- Georg

Regards.
-- 
Manuel Collado