Re: Character Sets (plain text police report)

["Charles Lindsey" <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk>]

In <asd6tj$isb$1@slb2.atl.mindspring.net> "Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> writes:

>My understanding was that the 16 bit characters covered most of the
>practical uses one would find in modern languages. The reason for the 32 bit
>characters was to provide for things that might be truly obscure (Egyptian
>heiroglyphics and such) or other special character sets that may not be that
>big a deal if Ada didn't support it.

Indeed so. If 16bit Wide-Characters are already available in Ada, then the
simplest thing is to use them as representing UTF-16. That would allow you
everything except the obscure Egyptian heiroglyphics (and they would
appear escaped, which would be messy).

You would use UTF-8 in external files (or whatever the OS wanted). Literal
strings in program source text would need some attention (ASCII characters
you just pad out to 16 bits).

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