Re: Avatox 1.0: Trouble with encoding in Windows

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

Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
> I'm sure no one will agree with me, but I don't see the value of 
> allowing characters outside 'a' .. 'z' & 'A' .. 'Z' in Ada identifiers. 
> Ada is designed to read like English, so in most cases identifiers 
> should be in English.

Mixing languages in prose disturbs me. I can get quite upset when people 
use English words in Swedish texts even though there are equivalent 
Swedish words. Yet I often program with Swedish identifiers. Program 
code � even Ada code � is so different from English that I don't read it 
as English text anyway.

(Actually, I think I didn't know any English at all when I first started 
learning programming. This may have something to do with it.)

> Of course, this argues that each language should have its own set of 
> reserved words. In many cases that could be achieved by a preliminary 
> translation phase that converts the reserved words into Ada's English 
> reserved words.

That'd impose an English-like grammar on other languages, which would 
often not work at all. There may well be languages where "if" isn't a 
separate word.

> For a truly international language, instead of reserved 
> words, maybe we should have symbols:
> 
> ? Kelko_Koza =>
>    ...
> ?? Koza_2 =>
>    ...
> ?=>
>    ...
> ?<;

That's still not international. A Greek question mark looks like a 
semicolon for starters.

Don't try. That way lies madness.

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