Re: Communications of ACM: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33!

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

"Florian Weimer" <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote in message 
news:8739pyk6j9.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de...
>* Michael R.:
>
>> It's interesting that Ada has already stepped away from ASCII. Many
>> of the test cases for my ZanyBlue.Text localization support library
>> contain non-ASCII source, e.g., a test enumeration with identifiers
>> containing Greek characters:
>
> Has the ARG sourted out the mess caused by the combination of
> non-ASCII identifiers, case insensitivity, and mandatory conversion of
> enumeration literals to upper case for output purposes?
>
> As far as I can tell, this is a classic choose-any-two situation.

Yes, and I can show you the many answers that we have. :-)

Seriously, the Ada 2005 standard really messed that up, and so far as I 
know, no one ever actually implemented the rules as intended (GNAT surely 
doesn't). I don't think any one would want to have, if the standard was 
followed to the letter, they would have to change the results of 'Image to 
*lower case* (because "convert to upper case" is defined as an mapping that 
maps to lower case characters -- oops) -- which of course would be seriously 
inconsistent with Ada 95 (that is a run-time change of results, the worst 
kind of incompatibility).

We've discussed how to fix this, but a final decision hasn't been made yet. 
See AI05-0227-1 and especially the discussion on it from the latest ARG 
meeting (whose minutes I posted Tuesday) -- find both on www.ada-auth.org.

                                         Randy.


                                           Randy.