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From: "John Duncan" <jddst19+@pitt.edu>
Subject: Re: obsolete ascii? (for language lawyers)
Date: 1999/07/08
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-07-08T00:00:00+00:00
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> Ada 83 allowed users to use ! for |, : for # (in based literals), and
> % for ".  There were (barely) good reasons for this at the time; it
> would have been better (IMHO) to implement preprocessors for those
> rare systems that couldn't use |, #, and ".  Ada 95 still allows these
> replacements.  When someone starts an Obfuscated Ada contest, we'll be
> ready.

I have to agree that it's important to have these things remain in the
language, just like it's important to include trigraphs in C++. The point is
that a new version has utility in being an upwardly-compatible superset of
the previous standard. ISO/IEC 646 is more than just a wacky 7-bit set. It
is a character set that the entire world agreed upon as a standard that
could be respected as an acceptable factor of the national languages in use
at the time. It's enough to represent without ambiguity almost all romantic
words, even though it is lacking on punctuation. (You can't do much with 108
characters, considering 52 of them are the basic romantic letters.)

But, provided that strict adherence to the standard is enabled, legacy code
written with trigraphs, which are pretty weird, can be compiled. In the same
way, the however many MSLOC written in standard Ada 83 can be compiled by a
validated Ada 95 compiler. Perhaps you enjoy porting code, but most people
don't. Porting can cause maintenance problems and people get associated to
porting projects that could have been more useful and happy doing
development.

I wonder if you think that COBOL should forgo its column-oriented structure
for a more terminal-friendly one and drop the references to a Hollerith card
completely from the standard. Then, expect people to use the new compilers.
It's absurd. As a new compiler vendor, you'd implement the extensions to
support card format anyway. It's just not worth alienating the old.

-John