Re: Ada generics

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
news:p6pjtv7qcu1s.vpcba1tkhwba$.dlg@40tude.net...
> On Wed, 3 Jan 2007 19:09:17 -0600, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
> > "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
> > news:1a9k0vk46bqrq.1cx6cdld0wd9f$.dlg@40tude.net...
>
> >> Yuck. Would "acce?" with Greek beta (?) and "if" with Cyrillic ? in it
be
> >> valid identifiers?
> >
> > Sure, the upper case of a Greek beta is still a Greek beta, it's not
"SS"
> > (and doesn't look anything like "ss", either). I don't know much about
> > Cyrillic, so I don't know the answer to that (but I suspect you do).
>
> My God. A good third of the Latin and Cyrillic glyphs are same.
Practically
> all vowels are. That means that *any* reserved word of Ada can be spelt as
> a proper identifier!

Yes, and so what? There would be little ambiguity introduced by using (say)
"overriding" as an identifier, so the meaning would be obvious to the
reader, and it won't confuse the compiler (usually it's more confusing to
the writer who didn't remember that some word is reserved). There are some
of them that should be avoided, of course, but there aren't many of those.

However, you alluded to a real concern in another message. That is, it's
possible to write two different identifiers that look the same. That would
be confusing and possibly cause problems. But that's already possible
(depending on the font), so it just is a slight expansion of a problem that
already exists. And it certainly can be handled with style checkers
(identifiers containing mixes of Latin, Cyrillic, or Greek characters are
suspicious, as are identifiers differing only by the replacement of Latin
characters with Cyrillic equivalents).

If that is a real concern, just insist that all of your programs are edited
with a 1984-vintage MS-DOS editor (like I do ;-), and you won't possibly be
able to have a problem. Indeed, I expect most programmers will continue to
do this (use tools that don't support Unicode), so any new problems will be
limited.

> (and of course, there is no any chance to reverse this nightmare...)

I don't see a nightmare, but I do see a need to have decent style rules
around the writing of identifiers. That's necessary even in Ada 83, they're
just more complex now.

                                Randy.