"Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne)" wrote in message news:2c2354d7-b427-4420-8161-7da417e92505@34g2000hsz.googlegroups.com... > LRM 2.1 4.1/2 : > > The semantics of an Ada program whose text is not in Normalization Form KC (as defined by section > > 24 of ISO/IEC 10646:2003) is implementation defined. > > Does it really apply as well on character literals, string literals > and comments ? > > If it does, this is very restrictive (mainly for character and string > literals). Yes, of course it applies. The reason for the wording is that some Unicode documents insist that programs that are not normalized are dangerous, and strongly recommend that everything be normalized. Initially, we required that the program be converted by the compiler into a normalized form before processing. But such a conversion has its own problems (and would be a lot of work for compiler implementers), so in the end we decided to cop-out with the statement you see above. I would suspect that most compilers simply don't care about unnormalized programs, and everything will work fine (without any normalization being applied, nor any rejection). But the rule allows a compilers especially worried about security to do normalization and/or code rejection. In any case, what a compiler does is supposed to be documented. (That's the difference between "implementation-defined" and "unspecified" in the Ada standard.) So you can depend on whatever the compiler does, you just can't *assume* that the code will be portable. Randy. P.S. If you want a more definitive answer, you have to ask the ARG by sending a formal question to Ada-Comment@Ada-Auth.org. I suggest joining the mailing list if you do that, so that you see any replies (especially requests for more information).