Re: Ada generics

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Georg Bauhaus" <bauhaus@arcor.de> wrote in message
news:1168028046.28234.27.camel@localhost...
> On Thu, 2007-01-04 at 19:32 -0600, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
> > If that is a real concern, just insist that all of your programs are
edited
> > with a 1984-vintage MS-DOS editor (like I do ;-), and you won't possibly
be
> > able to have a problem. Indeed, I expect most programmers will continue
to
> > do this (use tools that don't support Unicode), so any new problems will
be
> > limited.
>
> Maybe there is a chance that UTF-8 will show its advantages in
> a trouble free transition from Latin-1 to UTF-8 where possible
> (string literals made for 8bit character set displays might need
> attention, I guess).

You missed the point, I think. I was responding to Dmitry's concern about
distinct identifiers that look alike. One way to avoid this is to use tools
that *only* support Latin-1. Then it's pretty hard to have that problem,
especially if you use a decent font.

There's nothing wrong with UTF-8, and that's certainly the preferred way to
get Unicode characters. But if you use UTF-8, then you have to face the
potential problem of confusing identifiers. As Dmitry says, the glyphs of
many distinct characters can be the same and usually are (for example,
between Latin and Cyrillic). Checking for that can only be done with tools
outside of the language (although they could be built into the compiler, as
Gnat does for some style checks). If you're not willing or able to use such
tools, then stick with Latin-1 only programs.

Recoding to UTF-8 actually introduces a potential problem where none existed
before. So it's not something that should be done unless you really need
Unicode characters...

                                Randy.