2.3 Identifiers

Reason: This rule was stated in the syntax in Ada 95, but that has gotten too complex in Ada 2005. Since other_format characters usually do not display, we do not want to count them as separating two underscores. 

Implementation Note: We match the reserved words after doing these transformations so that the rules for identifiers and reserved words are the same. (This allows other_format characters, which usually don't display, in a reserved word without changing it to an identifier.) Since a compiler usually will lexically process identifiers and reserved words the same way (often with the same code), this will prevent a lot of headaches. 

Ramification: The rules for reserved words differ in one way: they define case conversion on letters rather than sequences. This means that some unusual sequences are neither identifiers nor reserved words. For instance, “ıf” and “acceß” have upper case conversions of “IF” and “ACCESS” respectively. These are not identifiers, because the transformed values are identical to a reserved word. But they are not reserved words, either, because the original values do not match any reserved word as defined or with any number of characters of the reserved word in upper case. Thus, these odd constructions are just illegal, and should not appear in the source of a program. 

Discussion: {AI95-00285-01} For instance, in most languages, the uppercase equivalent of LATIN SMALL LETTER I (a lower case letter with a dot above) is LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I (an upper case letter without a dot above). In Turkish, though, LATIN SMALL LETTER I and LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I are two distinct letters, so the upper case equivalent of LATIN SMALL LETTER I is LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE, and the upper case equivalent of LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I is LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I. Take for instance the following identifier (which is the name of a city on the Tigris river in Eastern Anatolia): 

Locale-independent conversion to upper case results in: 

This means that the four following sequences of characters represent the same identifier, even though for a locutor of Turkish they would probably be considered distinct words: 

An implementation targeting the Turkish market is allowed (in fact, expected) to provide a nonstandard mode where case folding is appropriate for Turkish. This would cause the original identifier to be converted to: 

and the four sequences of characters shown above would represent four distinct identifiers.

Lithuanian and Azeri are two other languages that present similar idiosyncrasies. 

We no longer include reserved words as identifiers. This is not a language change. In Ada 83, identifier included reserved words. However, this complicated several other rules (for example, regarding implementation-defined attributes and pragmas, etc.). We now explicitly allow certain reserved words for attribute designators, to make up for the loss. 

Ramification: Because syntax rules are relevant to overload resolution, it means that if it looks like a reserved word, it is not an identifier. As a side effect, implementations cannot use reserved words as implementation-defined attributes or pragma names. 

{AI95-00285-01} {extensions to Ada 95} An identifier can use any letter defined by ISO-10646:2003, along with several other categories. This should ease programming in languages other than English.