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From: "Hyman Rosen" <hyman.rosen@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards
Date: 27 Feb 2007 06:52:18 -0800
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On Feb 26, 7:34 pm, "Randy Brukardt" <r...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
> The problem is that if it doesn't fit, you can't recover

Granted, but that's not really the point. On a modern computer system,
given that it's reading input from a file or standard input, the
programmer can reasonably expect that there are at least many tens of
megabytes available to be allocated. Sure there can be inputs that
will exceed that, but then you're really in a different domain.

Think of it this way - when you decide to sort data, you need to
choose between internal and external sorts. You can't do that without
a notion of a threshold size. Clearly that size has increased over the
years. Reading input is similar. Many programs can now very reasonably
expect to read in their entire input into memory at once before
processing any of it, and if that's not going to work because of
allocation on the stack then there should be an alternative.