Re: obsolete ascii? (for language lawyers)

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>]

Peter Hermann <ica2ph@alpha1.csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de> writes:

> Thanks to John Herro,  David C. Hoos, Sr.,  Ted Dennison.
> I am afraid I did not explain my question precisely enough.
> With Ada95 we have a quite better type character, but
> I can't see any reason why i should not have the possibility
> to directly write down e.g. the bel-character, the ff-character,
> the cr-character, the esc-character etc. etc. as a simple identifier,

You could not write just "BEL" in Ada 83, and you still can't in Ada 95.
You have to say "Ascii.BEL;", or you can "use Ascii;" and then you can
say just "BEL".  Same for both Ada 83 and Ada 95.  This is good -- I
don't want my namespace cluttered with all those arcane symbols, most of
which I never use.  Furthermore, the meaning of these control characters
on I/O is rather non-portable, so they shouldn't be directly visible
everywhere.

You cannot say "with Ascii;" -- the name Ascii is always directly
visible (unless you hide it with something else called Ascii).

> the comfort of which will be removed as soon as the
> 'obsolete' package ascii will be removed!

All compilers are required to support package Ascii and all the other
Obsolescent Features.  I doubt if any of the Obsolescent Features will
ever be removed from the language.

> We even cannot write something like character'(bel) or the like.
> Sort of latin1.bel could do it? 

In Ada 95, you can also "with Ada.Characters.Latin_1;", and then say
"Latin_1.BEL", and you can also use a use clause, of course.

> Are there better ideas? Or did I miss a given feature?

You seem to be saying that Ada 95 took something away, which is not
True.  Package Ascii is still there, and still works exactly the same
way.

- Bob
-- 
Change robert to bob to get my real email address.  Sorry.