Re: Latest suggestion for 202x

[Optikos <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Saturday, June 15, 2019 at 6:59:41 PM UTC-5, Micah Waddoups wrote:
> Following is my comment of appreciation AND my suggestion that is a very basic and important level of support for Unicode.
> 
> Frankly, the former rules for directly specifying the contents of an array were perfect, when you can only use parenthesis.  Being able to use square brackets to improve the readability of an array is brilliant because it is familiar to those who use other languages

1) Fortran and Ada are the mainstream languages that utilize parentheses () for array indexing, following the reason #3 below.
2) Algol-family languages (especially the widely-influential Algol60 and the otherwise-influential-on-Ada Algol68) utilize brackets [] for array indexing.  Nearly all other programming languages (which often are little more than Algol60 rejiggered a little bit) have followed Algol's lead on array indexing via bracket [] syntax.
3) Mathematics utilizes subscripts on variables for the customary equivalent of array indexing, although mathematics could be said to also permit modeling array indexing as a narrower application of the generalized function-parenthesis notation f(i), just like Ada emulates.  Hence, Fortran & Ada are more true to mathematics' f(i) notation for representing array indexing as a function-invocation syntax.

> and it does very little to change what is already part of the language definition (square brackets are already use in a way that does not conflict).  Therefore, it is not confusing, just new.
> 
> As for the other uses, I can't fully wrap my head around it, because I don't have time to study that part yet.
> 
> I have a suggestion, and I am sorry I haven't searched thoroughly to see if someone has suggested this already, though I don't believe they have.  Unicode and UTF are supported very well, however, the support is simply limited to the packages starting at Ada.Strings.UTF_Encoding.  There is no connection to Character_Set found in Maps.  Since many lines of code are designed around the traditional Character_Set in Ada.Strings, the categories of UTF should be conveyable as a (Wide_+)Character_Set so that the much existing code does not have to be fundamentally or completely redesigned in order to use the support to Unicode.  Please consider making Unicode categories available as character_sets (obviously omitting any characters from a category that are out of the range of the string, such as String, sans block drawing, vs. Wide_String, with block drawing).
> 
> If the character_set support for Unicode is not included in the pre-built standard libraries, then it will be much elaboration and unnecessary code to try to implement it correctly.
> 
> Does anybody agree or disagree with this very simple, but very impactful suggestion?