From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: Wed, 21 Oct 92 09:07:10 EDT From: karl@grebyn.com (Karl A. Nyberg) Subject: Re: Why no umlauts in Ada comments? Message-ID: <9210211307.AA28973@genesis.grebyn.com> List-Id: In article 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 -- -- Karl Nyberg -- karl@grebyn.com Grebyn Corporation -- 1-703-281-2194 P. O. Box 497 -- I support freedom of choice Vienna, VA 22183-0497 -- for unborn women. Get it?