Re: Avatox 1.0: Trouble with encoding in Windows

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sat, 16 Sep 2006 00:29:24 +0200, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-09-15 at 20:53 +0200, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> 
>> IMO, the idea to use Unicode for program sources is wrong. The language (be
>> it formal or natural) should have a finite and reasonably small alphabet.
>> Unicode is practically an open-end set of symbols most of them you wouldn't
>> be able to either recognize or remember again.
> 
> Unicode is quite flexible and allows a project to choose a reasonable
> subset of characters. A portable subset is fairly easy to describe
> because both Ada and UCS define a common character set from which you
> can choose. No lengthy discussions of how to interpret 8 bits,
> no issues with conforming compilers.

Are you disagree with the point? How can a language be based on multiple
alphabets? [you are talking about subsets] Would it be still one language?
In the history there are examples of written natural languages changing
alphabets.

> Greek.Ω /= Electric.Ω is an issue in Ada 95, too, when you
> use local character sets for two different files.
> 
> Shou1d the number l, sorry, 1, not occur in source text, because it
> is too easy to miss the difference, so please, remove it from the
> Ada grammar? ;-)

That is an issue of choosing a proper typeface. But Omega (glyph) is same.
Code positions (semantic meaning of the symbol, Ohm vs. Greek Omega) are
different. Exactly this is wrong. Because the semantics of a symbol is to
be defined solely by the language, by Ada in our case. Unicode is not a
language, so far, however, nothing would prevent us to define a Unicode
position for any possible Ada program... (:-))

> You can extend the Unicode subset chosen for the project later, without
> introducing ambiguity or a configuration issue. Using Unicode for
> program source text lets you write identifiers that just cannot coexists
> in Latin_1, or any 8bit character set.

There are many ways to make code unmaintainable, like writing identifiers
in linear B syllabary...

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de