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From: Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.cygnus.argh.org>
Subject: Re: Why is it Called a Package?
Date: 2000/04/08
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Date: 2000-04-07T22:16:55+00:00
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Richard D Riehle <laoXhai@ix.netcom.com> writes:

> Curly braces, yet.  I recall reading somewhere that the reason for
> not including curly braces in Ada was due to the worldwide shortage
> of {  and  } created by heavy usage of the C family of languages. It
> is simply a matter of economics.  Perhaps the same economics applies
> to the square brackets.  :-)

I think Ada's conservative source character set is due to the fact
that the full ASCII set is not available in all parts of the world.
For example, in Germany, a national variant of ISO 646 is still widely
used[1].  On a ISO 646-DE terminal, "@[]\{}|~" is viewed as
"��������", for example.

[1] Given its limitations.  I hope only very few programmers still
have to maintain source code in this character set, but it appears
that some large data processing systems still use it, and a lot of
embedded systems.