Re: character literals

[adambeneschan@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, February 11, 2014 5:30:22 PM UTC-8, Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> On 02/11/2014 04:56 PM, Adam Beneschan wrote:
> 
> >
> 
> > The first "loop" statement, which is ambiguous, was legal in Ada 83, when
> > there was only one character type; when Wide_Character was added to Ada 95
> > [Wide_Wide_Character wasn't added until Ada 2005], this became illegal, which
> > caused some compatibility headaches for existing code.
> 
> Nonsense. Ada 83 had user-defined character types. ARM-83 3.5.2 ("Character 
> Types") includes the declaration of character type Roman_Digit.

But '0' and '9' aren't ROMAN_DIGITs, so those wouldn't have made the loop illegal, right?  

OK, technically, you're right, that the loop *might* *not* be legal if there were a visible user-defined enumeration type that included '0' and '9'.  In practice, that would have been extremely uncommon, I think.  (I don't believe I've *ever* seen a user-defined character type in production code.)  We had a lot of Ada 83 code with legal loops like this, and they became illegal with Ada 95, so that part isn't nonsense.
   
                              -- Adam