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Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:40:28 +0100
From: Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>
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Subject: Re: Does OpenToken support Unicode
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Date: 2012-01-24T11:40:28+01:00
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On 23.01.12 23:48, mtrenkmann wrote:

> To support constants and non-generic Ada procedures one has to turn
> them into formal parameters of generic OpenToken packages, right?
> Maybe this could end in an generics instantiation nightmare. This let
> me come to the question why in Ada are some packages prefixed with
> Wide_Wide_ and not generic. (Sorry for this question, but a come from
> the C++ universe.)

The question (not the first time someone asks) seems quite justified
by Ada, since it does have such generic standard packages, that is,
packages that feature a formal of a scalar type, such as
Generic_Elementary_Functions, or the traditional I/O packages.

One answer is backwards compatibility business, IIRC.
Guessing, it might not have felt nice to have both Character
packages and generic character packages; using a 1-1 onto
correspondence to replace packages with instances of packages
was perhaps still considered a cause of forced modification of
working systems...

For today, and new systems, maybe using streams might lead
to a solution that can be adapted to some abstract character type.

There is some overlap between containers' subprograms and string
subprograms, which might be another path.