Re: Ada and Unicode

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Vadim Godunko" <vgodunko@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:3962d55d-10e8-4dff-9ad3-847d69c3c337n@googlegroups.com...
...
>I think ((Wide_)Wide_)(Character|String) is obsolete for modern systems and
>programming languages; more cleaner types and API is a requirement now.

...which essentially means Ada is obsolete in your view, as String in 
particular is way too embedded in the definition and the language-defined 
units to use anything else. You'd end up with a mass of conversions to get 
anything done (the main problem with Ada.Strings.Unbounded).

Or I suppose you could replace pretty much the entire library with a new 
one. But now you have two of everything to confuse newcomers and you still 
have a mass of old nonsense weighing down the language and complicating 
implementations.

>The only case when old character/string types is really makes value is low 
>resources embedded systems; ...

...which of course is at least 50% of the use of Ada, and probably closer to 
90% of the money. Any solution for Ada has to continue to meet the needs of 
embedded programmers. For instance, it would need to support fixed, bounded, 
and unbounded versions (solely having unbounded strings would not work for 
many applications, and indeed not just embedded systems need to restrict 
those -- any long-running server has to control dynamic allocation)

>...in other cases their use generates a lot of hidden issues, which is very 
>hard to detect.

At least some of which occur because a string is not an array, and the 
forcible mapping to them never worked very well. The Z-80 Pascals that we 
used to implement the very earliest versions of Ada had more functional 
strings than Ada does (by being bounded and using a library for most 
operations) - they would have been way easier to extend (as the Python ones 
were, as an example).

                        Randy.