Re: Clear Screen

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Geert asks

<<Maybe you could explain why the perfectly reasonable and standard use
of Ascii.ESC, Ascii.TAB etc has been declared obsolete?>>

because the referenced standard is obsolete. You know what Ascii means
to you, but the standards world does not. This standard has been obsoleted
by the standard referenced in the Latin-1 package.

So from a formalistic point of view there was an argument that this
package was no longer appropriate so it was put in Annex J (we could
not actually remove it because of compatibility issues).

I argued strongly against the whole idea of Annex J, but I lost (and
surprisingly, I was in a small minority here. But I let it go because
this is a documentation issue only!

The features in annex J are fully supported in Ada 95, and are tested
by the ACVC suite, and must be fully supported in all Ada 95 compilers.
They may be used freely in Ada 95 programs -- some people may feel for
aesthetic reasons that they want to avoid the use of annex J features,
but that's a bed they make for themselves.

If you feel, as I certainly do, that it makes more sense to write Ascii.LF,
then to with the Latin-1 package -- this incidentally is especially true
if you are allergic to use clauses -- then go ahead and write Ascii.LF.

Sure, there are some people who harbour the fantasy that the annex J
features will be eliminated in Ada 0X (these must be the same people
who thought the ALTER verb could be removed from COBOL-8X) but in practice
the compatibility argument will be *stronger* next time around, not
weaker, so these features are not about to disappear!