Re: State of the compiler market

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On 30/06/2017 12:10, J-P. Rosen wrote:
> Le 30/06/2017 à 10:10, Dmitry A. Kazakov a écrit :
>> Semantically all strings are chains of code points.
> But different strings may use different encoded character sets, hence
> different code points.

Even when they rarely do, that is a constraint, almost never static as 
you have no control on the text input.

>> True, however for performance reasons many applications tend to deal
>> with UTF-8 octets rather than with code points. I doubt anybody uses
>> characters at all.

> ?? I certainly use it, or Wide_Character for ASIS applications.

You probably do it as a code point, not as a character.

> If you
> need to sort strings, or do anything more complicated than storing
> strings, you'd better decode the strings and not keep them as UTF-8.

Why? The order induced by code points has no more sense that one induced 
by octets. For parsing and compiling I practically never use code 
points. Searching a table of tokens ordered by octets works just fine.

>> The magic is called array. You have to use magic spell "type ... is
>> array (...) of ..." with severe limitation coming with.
> ?? Array magic? It is a normal construct of any (almost) programming
> language.

Any construct which cannot be expressed through other constructs is 
magic per definition.

> Unless you are so OO-maniac as to consider that a 10-elements
> structure should be an extension of a 9-elements structure...

Huh, but arrays are OO-maniacal because an array slice is substitutable 
for array and conversely. In that sense one is an extension of another. 
This type equivalence induces a class of array/slice types, all done 
magically in Ada. The plea is to have a type mechanics to express such 
relationships at the library level.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de