Re: [GNAT-specific] Using the Form parameter/-gnatW switch

[Georg Bauhaus <rm-host.bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de>]

On 6/25/10 4:08 AM, deadlyhead wrote:
> I've been messing around a bit with files of various encodings, and
> just recently I've become aware of the Form parameter to Open and
> Create and the -gnatW switch for handling character encoding.

(Sometimes I think that Ada designers should, as part of their
"engineering awareness", work in a "web shop" for a few
months.  The experience of working with real encoded data
might make them look again at character encoding, but less,
uhm, condescendingly.  Character encoding (or string
encoding) is a representation issue and should be treated at
this level.  ISO 10646 deals with UTF.  A character is
ubiquitously a fundamental piece of data.

In my dream, then, there is enough motivation to make
character encoding a solid part of the language proper
and thus have Ada be the first language that makes character
representation well defined and easy to use!)

> I'm okay with giving up on this method and using the XML/Ada Unicode
> libraries for the text translation.  It'd be nice if I didn't have to,
> though.

Does GNAT 2010 support the Ada 2012 strings encoding package?

http://www.ada-auth.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/ai05s/ai05-0137-1.txt?rev=1.5&raw=Y

Another alternative might be EAstrings (encoding aware strings).
It has an IO child package. It's part of AdaCL at
http://adacl.sourceforge.net/