Re: Ada + Multi-Byte/Wide Chars = Modern Language?

[stt@henning.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft)]

In article <1995Jan29.171712.4531@midway.uchicago.edu>,
Richard L. Goerwitz <goer@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:

>In R. William Beckwith writes:
>>
>>    -- The declaration of type Wide_Character is based on the standard
>>    -- ISO 10646 BMP character set.  The first 256 positions have the
>>    -- same contents as type Character.  See 3.5.2.
>        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>What is meant by "same contents"?  There are several multi-byte and wide
>character standards.  By using the word "contents" here is the standard
>implying that type Character is assumed to encode specific glyphs?

The standard doesn't use the term "contents" -- that was Bill's 
paraphrasing.

In any case, type Character is (in the "standard mode") interpreted
as the characters of ISO 8859-1 (aka Latin-1), or equivalently
Row 00 of ISO 10646 BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane).
Type Wide_Character is (in the standard mode) interpreted as the characters
of ISO 10646 BMP.

Compilers are allowed to support localization of Character to better
support the local character set, though Ada has always supported
multiple character sets very well, since character/string literals can be
of any "character"/"string" type, either Standard.Character/String or 
a user-defined character/string type.

>   Richard L. Goerwitz     ***      goer@midway.uchicago.edu

-Tucker Taft  stt@inmet.com
Intermetrics, Inc.