3.2. Section 2: Lexical Elements

Ada source programs are represented in standard text files, using Latin-1 coding. Latin-1 is ASCII with additional characters used for representing foreign languages. The lower half (character codes 16#00# ... 16#7F#) is identical to standard ASCII coding, but the upper half is used to represent the additional characters. Any of these extended characters is allowed in character or string literals. Moreover, extended characters that represent letters can be used in identifiers.

On the target ERC32 Ada supports the character sets defined by the Ada 95 Reference Manual. These are the predefined types Character and Wide_Character.

The predefined type Character is a character type whose values correspond to the 256 code positions of Row 00 (also known as Latin-1) of the ISO 10646 Basic Multi-lingual Plane (BMP).

The predefined type Wide_Character is a character type whose values correspond to the 65536 code positions of the ISO 10646 Basic Multi-lingual Plane (BMP).

The maximum number of characters in a source line is 255.

The maximum length of a lexical element is 255 characters.