Re: very specific question on Ada syntax

[Florian Weimer <Florian.Weimer@RUS.Uni-Stuttgart.DE>]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:

> > BTW, Unicode is now a 21.something bit character set, and the
> > Wide_Character type is no longer appropriate for representing
> Unicode
> > (UCS-4) characters.  Will Ada be adapted accordingly?
> 
> I think in practice that the 16-bit subset of Unicode, the BMP
> page of 10646, will be much more widely used in practice than
> the full 21-bit set, and it was a quite deliberate decision
> in the design of Ada to restrict Wide_Chararacter to the BMP.

Things have changed rather dramatically.  Just two years ago, it
seemed that the other planes would be used for rarely-used scripts,
most of them only interesting scholars (e.g. Linear B).  Now there are
several proposals which could become pretty relevant as soon as
Unicode is more widely used (if this really happens some day), for
example the alphanumeric math characters.

> Of course there is certainly nothing to stop the addition of
> a Wide_Wide_Character type to the language, and at the very
> least it would be worth an ARG ruling permitting this usage.

Hmm, I'll try to figure out the formal requirements for an ARG
submission.  Which is the correct address?

http://www.ada-auth.org/arm-html/RM-0-3.html mentions the address
ada-comment@ada-auth.org, but the ARG procedures
http://www.ada-auth.org/ai-files/minutes/arg-proc.txt request to use
ada-comment@sw-eng.falls-church.va.us.