Re: Communications of ACM: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33!

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Randy Brukardt:

> "Florian Weimer" <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote in message 
> news:8739pyk6j9.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de...
>>* Michael R.:
>>
>>> It's interesting that Ada has already stepped away from ASCII. Many
>>> of the test cases for my ZanyBlue.Text localization support library
>>> contain non-ASCII source, e.g., a test enumeration with identifiers
>>> containing Greek characters:
>>
>> Has the ARG sourted out the mess caused by the combination of
>> non-ASCII identifiers, case insensitivity, and mandatory conversion of
>> enumeration literals to upper case for output purposes?
>>
>> As far as I can tell, this is a classic choose-any-two situation.
>
> Yes, and I can show you the many answers that we have. :-)
>
> Seriously, the Ada 2005 standard really messed that up, and so far as I 
> know, no one ever actually implemented the rules as intended (GNAT surely 
> doesn't).

This matches my testing, but it was recently claimed on this newsgroup
that GNAT implements the standard accurately. 8-/

> I don't think any one would want to have, if the standard was
> followed to the letter, they would have to change the results of
> 'Image to *lower case* (because "convert to upper case" is defined
> as an mapping that maps to lower case characters -- oops) -- which
> of course would be seriously inconsistent with Ada 95 (that is a
> run-time change of results, the worst kind of incompatibility).

Oops indeed.

> We've discussed how to fix this, but a final decision hasn't been made yet. 
> See AI05-0227-1 and especially the discussion on it from the latest ARG 
> meeting (whose minutes I posted Tuesday) -- find both on www.ada-auth.org.

Are there any commercial users of this feature?  I'm sure that some
teaching material needs updating because the extended source character
set is regular used to hype Ada.  But it's very likely that students
will have trouble compiling such source code files, so this capability
will not be used in any central manner.

Myself, I would make the feature obsolescent, and give broad
permissions to implementations when they encounter non-ASCII source
code.  Spending any additional effort on this looks like a complete
waste to me.

By the way, every other HTTP request to www.ada-auth.org results in an
empty result for me.