This is the mail archive of the
gcc@gcc.gnu.org
mailing list for the GCC project.
Re: Query on UTF-32 encodings for letters
Marcin Dalecki wrote:
On 2005-01-17, at 20:09, Robert Dewar wrote:
It would be interesting to know an example of what you state above.
Certainly people have been using Latin-1 to write Ada in countries
all over the world, and no one has ever found the folding rules
for identifiers to be in any way inconvenient.
1. Can't provide efficient hashing mechanisms for item lookup.
2. Can't even read the contents on a system with a different locale.
3. Can't change the locale at will.
I am talking specifically about the issue of Ada folding rules with
Latin-1 and ten years experience with them. You seem to be talking
about different issues entirely. Note that I talked about the folding
rules above. I think you did not read carefully, and thought I said
that people were happy to write in Latin-1. That of course is false.
That is why GNAT has always provided -gnatiw to allow full 16-bit
characters in identifiers, and it is why the new standard has
mandated this, and extended it to all planes of 10646.
The most common mistake is to think that systems are either Latin-1 or
something else. But in reality the most common case it that you want:
1. Change locale at the fly. (Yes the whole LC_ALL and famliy is
literally nearly
usless...)
2. Use multiple locales at the same time.
This has nothing whatever to do with folding of identifiers in Ada.
You are using the opportunity for general discussions of
internationalization. Fine, but it is not relevant to this thread
which is very specifically about folding Ada identifiers.
> ISO for cyrillic is a nice example for such a thing.
Literally nobody to whom it matters is using it
because some illiterate
imbecile managed to provide an 8 bit encoding for this alphabet which is
in fact not in proper order and which isn't even complete.
Well perhaps true in your world, but in fact the Cyrillic ISO
table for Ada identifiers was submitted by a GNAT user, so your
claim is most certainly false in the world we are talking about
here. Order is of course totally irrelevant for identifiers, and
apparently it is complete enough to be useful to Ada programmers
in the real world :-)
You really seem to have been set off on some flame war here and
I don't think it is relevant, since we are not talking about the
general issue, but about Ada identifiers. If you think you have
a useful contribution to make *on that subject*, by all means
read the ai (I gave the reference), and submit comments to
ada comment. The ARG will be happy to take them into account.