Re: Character Sets (plain text police report)

["Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

It might make an easy extension to the Ada standard to include 32-bit
Unicode. After all, its pretty much just a matter of taking existing
packages and changing a few things so you could have Wide_Wide_Character.
The question is, would it have sufficient utility to make it worth the
effort? (Is there much use out there for 32-bit characters?)

Perhaps if some additional utility was piled on top of it so that reading a
text file, Ada would automatically determine what it was looking at and give
you back text in the proper size (create something like "Universal_String"
and a whole bunch of utilities around it so it would hold 8, 16 or 32-bit
characters depending on how it was loaded) - but I don't see how that could
be done for all text files. Only those that conformed to some other
standard, like XML, where you can determine from convention what sort of
characters will follow.

The concept is a little vague in my mind, but I could imagine how something
like this might be a useful idea for a standard Ada library. It really
doesn't require any fundamental changes to the language.

MDC
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Marin David Condic
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My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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Robert C. Leif <rleif@rleif.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.1038602282.10532.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
Oops. My apologies.
Bob Leif
The correct text version is below.
Addendum: The solution is the creation of versions of Ada.Strings.Bounded
for 16 and 32 bit characters. The 32 bit Unicode characters allow direct
comparison of characters based on their position in Unicode.