From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c7d533acec91ae16 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Samuel Mize Subject: Re: Question for the folks who designed Ada95 Date: 1999/04/28 Message-ID: <7g5jm9$hrr@news2.newsguy.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 471689915 References: <7g2qu4$ca4$1@usenet.rational.com> <7g3b5g$p92$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7g4ae3$hjh2@ftp.kvaerner.com> <3725C49E.8106A44B@aasaa.ofe.org> <7g4mrs$v5n$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <3725EE85.54163275@aasaa.ofe.org> Organization: ImagiNet Communications, Ltd. User-Agent: tin/pre-1.4-981002 ("Phobia") (UNIX) (AIX/3-2) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-04-28T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: David Starner quoted Robert Dewar: ...The requirement for the character set >> in Ada 83 was much more strenuous, it included >> compatibility with current common usage, which included >> EBCDIC (e.g. IBM keypunches) which did NOT provide the [] >> characters. > > Interesting. Then why was support for package ASCII required, and how > was it supposed to be supported in a non-ASCII enviroment? Don't confuse the character set that the program can manipulate, with the character set that it is written in. An Ada program on an EBCDIC machine would manipulate a non-EBCDIC representation of characters, but it might have been typed up in EBCDIC to be compiled. The type Character is an enumeration (of character literals), representing each character with a specified code. My 83 Rationale isn't handy. I'd guess Character was defined this way specifically so that data would easily interchange between Ada programs, and so the programmer could reason about the ordering of the characters (e.g., digits are in the range 0 .. 9). Best, Sam Mize -- Samuel Mize -- smize@imagin.net (home email) -- Team Ada Fight Spam: see http://www.cauce.org/ \\\ Smert Spamonam