Robert Eachus wrote:

>Right now the situation is slightly chaotic due to the Euro currency
>symbol, which is in the newest version of Latin-1.  It replaces the
>"international currency symbol," which no one ever used anyway.  Other than
>that ASCII is now 8-bits and identical to Latin-1.

Interestingly, and as Robert may recall, Jean Ichbiah once proposed that Ada
allow the international currency symbol as a unary operator symbol that was
available for users to overload.  JDI's idea was that it could serve as a
lightweight notation for type conversions for user-defined types (typically
unary "+" is used for that purpose).  For various reasons his proposal was
not accepted, which is probably a good thing given Robert's news that this
symbol is being evicted from Latin-1 to make room for the euro.

Ben Brosgol
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>
>    (I probably should recommend an extension to Ada 95, to allow
>"Euro_Sign renames Currency_Sign;" to be added to the package
>Ada.Characters.Latin1.)
>
>    ISO/IEC 6429:1992  Which names and assigns the control characters to
>code maps.  (There is also another such standard for biblographic use which
>has many differences, but fortunately it was never widely used.)
>
>    ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set
(UCS).
>This is the way forward.  You may have heard of Unicode a 16-bit character
>set, which modulo occiasional version skew is the Basic Multilingual Plane
>of 10646.
>But 10646 contains much much more.  It basically defines a 32-bit!
>character set, and ways to subset and encode it.  Some of these encodings
>look like the lower page of Latin-1 with various encodings for the upper
>page, so they don't take up much more space than Latin-1 for things that
>can be written in Latin-1.
>
>
>                                        Robert I. Eachus
>
>with Standard_Disclaimer;
>use  Standard_Disclaimer;
>function Message (Text: in Clever_Ideas) return Better_Ideas is...
>