Re: Why no umlauts in Ada comments?

[karl@grebyn.com (Karl A. Nyberg)]

In article <MD57N5C@math.fu-berlin.de> you write:
>Why on earth are comments specifically defined in the LRM to just
>be the letters "A".."Z", "a",,"z", the digits and some special characters?
>Why is the definition not just *any* character representation except
>carriage return? We are using Meridian's Ada compiler for PCs, and
>the students comment their code in German. German, as well as many
>other non-English languages, has a number of special letters, such as
>a-umlaut, o-umlaut ant u-umlaut. We have to write out "ae" "oe" and
>"ue", which doesn't look very nice at all, although strangely enough
>the "ess-zet" representation *is* accepted. 

According to AI-00339/04-BI-WJ, a binding commentary approved by all the
necessary organizations (AJPO for ANSI and ISO):

	An implementation is allowed to accept an extended character set
	(i.e., graphic characters whose codes do not belong to the ISO
	seven-bit coded character set (ISO standard 646)) as long as the
	additional charcters appear only in comments (i.e., the dditional
	characters only appear after two adjacent hyphens and precede th end
	of the line. 

You can find this on page 2-6 of the 2nd edition of my Annotated Ada
Reference Manual (shameless plug, eh? :-)), LRM 2.7(1)-[A..B].

Note also, it says "allowed", not "required".

-- Karl --

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