Why no umlauts in Ada comments?

Why no umlauts in Ada comments?

[cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!ira.uka.de!ira.uka.de!math.fu-berlin.de!weberwu]

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. 

Just because the DoD financed the language shouldn't mean that you have
to use English in your comments! Is this an oversight - typical for
anglo-american centric designers - or is there a real reason?
-- 
Debora Weber-Wulff                       dww@inf.fu-berlin.de
Institut fuer Informatik                 +49 30 89691 124
Nestorstr. 8-9                           (INCLUDE "standard.disclaimer")
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Why no umlauts in Ada comments?

[pa.dec.com!nntpd2.cxo.dec.com!bonmot!wallace]

weberwu@inf.fu-berlin.de (Debora Weber-Wulff) writes:
: 
: Just because the DoD financed the language shouldn't mean that you have
: to use English in your comments! Is this an oversight - typical for
: anglo-american centric designers - or is there a real reason?
: -- 
: Debora Weber-Wulff                       dww@inf.fu-berlin.de
: Institut fuer Informatik                 +49 30 89691 124
: Nestorstr. 8-9                           (INCLUDE "standard.disclaimer")
: D-W-1000 Berlin 31                       (PRINTN (WITTY-MESSAGE TODAY))

While I don't speak or read German worth a darn, I'm all for this in
Ada 9x!  The extenstions to the character set should be done.  How
about ISO Latin-1 for the character set?  I'm sure that Tucker and the
rest of the Ada 9x crew have talked about this issue (a wrong
assumption?).

Aloha,
	Richard

Richard Wallace
Digital Equipment Corporation
301 Rockrimmon Blvd. South
CXO2-1/7A
Colorado Springs, CO 80919-2398
(719)548-2792
<wallace@cookie.enet.dec.com>

	"The opinions expressed are my own, Uncle Ken or Uncle Bob
	 may, or may not, agree with me."

Re: Why no umlauts in Ada comments?

[Karl A. Nyberg]

In article <MD57N5C@math.fu-berlin.de> 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 --

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