Re: Ada generics

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

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!

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

> It should be pointed out that one of the reasons for Ada's support of
> Unicode is that we had a long discussion of how to support Latin-9 (which
> contains the euro symbol). Eventually, we decided that that way lies
> madness - at least by using Unicode, there is only one definition to worry
> about, rather than a set of them. My only regret is that we didn't find a
> way to include real runtime UTF-8 support in the language: it's wasteful to
> store everything as 32-bit characters.

Ah, that's because we still don't have proper subtypes in the language. If
all strings were derived from the same root with no requirement to share
the representation, we could add UTF-8 and 125xWide strings without any
trouble.

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