Re: Ada, Gnat and Unicode

["Steve" <nospam_steved94@comcast.net>]

A good place to start looking is to download XML/Ada and have a look at the
unicode part.  There appears to be extensive support there.

Steve
(The Duck)


"Jano" <402450@cepsz.unizar.es> wrote in message
news:5d6fdb61.0310230648.62219442@posting.google.com...
> Hello sirs,
>
> I'm thinking about the best procedure to internationalize some Ada
> program and I have some doubts. Please shed some light if you can.
>
> AFAIK, the Ada Character type is the 256 first values from ISO 10646
> (Latin1). In the same fashion, Wide_Character are the 2**16 values of
> that same ISO. The ARM furthermore says that an implementation can
> provide alternate representations conforming to local conventions, but
> later it states that said representation should be a proper subset of
> these two. I'm not very sure about what that implies.
>
> Some old discussion suggest that 10646 and Unicode are equivalent, but
> it seems that later they dissociated. In any case Unicode is more than
> the 2**16 values that Wide_character can hold so I'm not sure that
> Wide_character is useful at all (?)
>
> Anyhow, I was thinking of using UTF8 encoding. That's convenient as it
> can hold anything in the Unicode world, is space efficient, provides
> good interoperability with other languages/Packages (GtkAda, Java,
> ...).
>
> My doubt principally comes from behavior when you're not using a
> Latin1 OS, for example a Chinese Windows. When you do some I/O, for
> example a read from console with Text_IO.Get (Wide_Text_IO?). Or when
> using Gnat.Directory_Operations to enumerate files.
>
> I don't find information in the Gnat UG/RM about these things. What
> will these functions return? It's specified somewhere, or will they
> pass the bytes from the underlying OS calls inside a String so I can't
> know in advance what to expect?
>
> Thanks for any clarifications,
>
> Alex.