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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: UTF-8 Output and "-gnatW8"
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2016 17:35:20 -0500
Organization: JSA Research & Innovation
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Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:29920
Date: 2016-03-29T17:35:20-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

"Michael Rohan" <michael@zanyblue.com> wrote in message 
news:6406289c-06a8-46d1-a633-8a1c8a22f79b@googlegroups.com...
...
>It does, however, feel like there is something missing where it's 
>"difficult" to have
>a Wide_String literal without having to have extra meta data for compiler 
>(-gnatW8)
>or having a relatively cumbersome concatenation of Wide_Character's based 
>on
>code points.  BTW, the performance of GNAT for such a concatenated string 
>is
>pretty dismal.

Both of these are clearly implementation issues as opposed to language 
issues. The language standard can have nothing to say about what incantation 
it takes to compile a program, and how one identifies the source format is 
just a small part of that. (As I previously said, a new compiler would 
probably make UTF-8 format the default, but changing the default on an 
existing compiler could cause trouble for many existing customers - I 
wouldn't expect such a change to be made lightly.) Usability of a compiler 
is completely out of bounds for a language standard (*any* language 
standard). (Janus/Ada doesn't support character values > 255 in any format; 
it still conforms to the older Ada Standards.)

And performance, of course, is clearly an implementation issue. (I also 
would be quite surprised if that was an issue for truly constant strings. I 
could see how it might be an issue if part of the string is calculated from 
some variable, but since Ada defines and requires static strings in some 
circumstances, an Ada compiler has the machinery to avoid any runtime costs 
for static string expressions.)

In any case, GNAT /= Ada.

                             Randy.