Re: Avatox 1.0: Trouble with encoding in Windows

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

Georg Bauhaus skrev:
> Randy Brukardt wrote:
> 
>> And
>> there is no chance of any sort of agreement on source representations for
>> ASIS (or even the naming of them) if there isn't be any for Ada.
> 
> Maybe a standard configuration pragma can be devised that informs
> Ada source processors of the encoding used in files/compilation
> units/...?

That would be great, seeing that filesystems in Unix and Windows (and 
probably most other OSes) typically can't keep track of what character 
encoding is used in each file.

Theoretically it's better to store the encoding outside the file so that 
you can know what encoding to use *before* you start reading the file. 
In practice this is usually impossible. The Unix approach is to have a 
system-wide locale setting that specifies a character encoding, and 
assume that all text files on the system use that encoding. This 
assumption collapses when you connect your system to the Internet and 
start exchanging data with others. Thus it's pretty much necessary to 
specify the encoding inside each file, like XML does.

Python has this feature. It allows an encoding declaration in a comment 
at the beginning of the file, and tries to be compatible with text editors:
http://docs.python.org/ref/encodings.html

-- 
Björn Persson                              PGP key A88682FD
                    omb jor ers @sv ge.
                    r o.b n.p son eri nu