Re: Bug in Ada - Latin 1 is not a subset of UTF-8

["G.B." <bauhaus@futureapps.invalid>]

On 19.10.16 10:49, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

>> The misconception is to think that String is meant to be
>> Latin-1 String. String isn't Latin-1 String. Ada states
>> a *correspondence*, but no essence at all.
>
> 3.5.2
>
> "The predefined type Character is a character type whose values
> correspond to the 256 code positions of Row 00 (also known as Latin-1)
   ^^^^^^^^^^
> of the ISO/IEC 10646:2003 Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)."

Exactly, it means, values aren't Latin-1, they correspond
to Latin-1 code points. (To be /= To correspond to.)


>>>> To get a subset U from a set S, you apply a constraint
>>>> to S. That's not (easily) expressible in Ada in this case.
>>>
>>> There is no such constraint at all. A-umlaut in Latin-1 is one
>>> character, in UTF-8 it is two characters.

A-Umlaut is a character, not a character-in-Some-Encoding-Form.
'€' is one, too, as are the four in "Łódź" that the man named
"Artiñano" (8 characters) could not manage to type into his letter
without accidentally spoiling his last name.


>> In Ada, A-Umlaut is not a character in Latin-1,
>
> It is. ISO/IEC 8859-1

For Ada, A-Umlaut is ("essence" vs "correspondence") not
a character in ISO/IEC 8859-1, but there exist correspondences
between A-Umlaut and the Ada Character and ISO/IEC 8859-1.
And we "cannot do it in a typed way, that is the whole point".

> it is merely a deficiency of Ada type system to do it properly.
> We cannot do it with generics or constrained subtypes, so we drop typing
> to have at least something.

Ada can add a constraining aspect to a type derived from String
so as to formally specify the set of values in that type.
In a way similar to

   type US_Elevator is new Integer range -10 .. 500
      with
        Static_Predicate => US_Elevator /= 13;

The short, informal name of that computable, exact specification
by a Predicate for the former type derived from String is "UTF-8".

It gives one-way substitutability: you can use a value of the
derived type wherever you can use a value of type String, if
there ever is a need for doing so (e.g. dumb String'Write can be
reused after Convert-ing to UTF_8_String (encoding)).