Re: Efficiently setting up large quantities of constant data

["rien" <aplisson-google@stochastique.net>]

Dr. Adrian Wrigley wrote:
> A similar question I have is how to link in regular files and access
> their contents in Ada.
>
> For example, suppose I have a binary file "distances.dat" containing
> the (road) distances between 1000 different cities.  This could be a
2MB
> file computed by another application. How can I build a single
executable
> file containing the data and access it from the Ada code?
>
> I presume this needs to be done at the linker stage, but I don't
> see any options to link in non-object files.  The obvious alternative
> of distributing the data files separately and reading them in
> is slower and much less tidy than having a single self-contained
binary.

i did that once with a C++ application and an XML resource file.

i wrote some XSL files which converted the XML resource to C++ code,
and this code was linked into the application. the transformation was
applied at build time using Xalan (which distributes with a pretty
small executable for doing this) and triggered from the makefile.
-- 
rien