Re: Unicode in Source Code (Ada95 and Java)

From: John Cowan (cowan@locke.ccil.org)
Date: Tue Jul 20 1999 - 11:32:24 EDT


Markus Kuhn wrote:

> The Ada community is very concerned about safety issues
> and about the readability of source code,

By what I understand, there is a fair body of Java source code
in Japan where identifiers are written in Japanese. So
"readability of source code" is perhaps a matter of interpretation.

> The presence of Unicode characters such as U+00D0, U+0110 and
> U+0189 introduces a lot of potential hazards that are best avoided by
> not allowing a too rich repertoires of characters in object identifiers.

It's very easy to catch these mechanically, though, because no sane
programmer will use more than one in a given piece of code.
(Who writes both Icelandic and Croatian/Vietnamese/Saami in the
same piece of code?)

> ([I] decided to use Ada95 for his PhD implementation project, because
> the language is at least as nice and modern as Java, but its compilers
> produce far more efficient native machine code.)

And Ada95 has a compiler available for the JVM, too.
 

-- 
	John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan	cowan@ccil.org
Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! / Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau / Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.
			-- Coleridge / Politzer



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT