Re: Supporting full Unicode

[David Starner <dvdeug@email.ro>]

On Wed, 12 May 2004 07:44:56 +0000, Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> 
> Brian Catlin asked:
>> The complete definition of Unicode allows for 2-,3-, and 4-byte
>> characters. How is this supported in Ada95 and Ada0y?
> 
> I am not aware of any differences between Ada 95 and Ada 2005 in that
> respect.  Ada 95 has a type Wide_Character, "whose values correspond
> to the 65536 code positions of the ISO 10646 Basic Multilingual Plane
> (BMP)." (RM 3.5.2(3)).  

Ada 2005 is apparently going to have a Wide_Wide_Character for full
Unicode. That's unfortunate; they should have defined Wide_Character
to be UTF-16 like Java did. Besides taking less space and hence
often being faster, this move leaves a Wide_Character that should never
be used but will anyway. (No, I don't care if you don't use those
characters; one of the people using your program will be an archaeologist
who wants to transfer his Unicode data from another program to yours,
and will be rather annoyed that your "Unicode" program doesn't support
perfectly valid Unicode data.)