Re: UNICODE - non-Asian

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

Bill, you asked:

<<If I can re-pulse the group on the original question.  My main problem
is Greek and Hebrew, not Japanese.  I agree that the Japanese are not
likely to favor UNICODE.

I get the impression that there is no applicable experience here.  If I
am wrong, please tell me.
>>

Greek uses an 8-bit code. It is one of the family of 8-bit codes of
which Latin-1 is an example. Generally any compiler will support
use in a Greek environment without much fiddling. In addition,
GNAT provides the option of using Latin-1/Latin-2/Latin-3/Latin-4
as well as the IBM PC set (both code pages 437 and 850) for identifiers.
This is a non-standard feature (although this kind of non-standard
capability is very much anticipated by 3.5.2(4):

                         Implementation Permissions

4   In a nonstandard mode, an implementation may provide other
interpretations for the predefined types Character and Wide_Character, to
conform to local conventions.

)

The main effect of selecting one of these options in GNAT (they are fully
documented in the GNAT documentation) is that you get proper recognition
of the full set of "letters" with proper upper/lower case equivalence.

I am not sure what encodings are standard for Hebrew, someone here should
know. I am a little suprised if we don't support it already, since we
have a number of customers in Israel, and this subject has not come up :-)