Re: Efficient io of arbitrary binary data.

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <3239B3B2.1AE4@cray.com>, "Brian R. Hanson" <brh@cray.com> writes:

> I a puzzled.  The approaches which Ada seems to allow all require 
> much more copying of data as I am not allowed to return a reference
> to a slice of an array I can only return the slice itself.

Presuming the concern is runtime efficiency rather than code inspection
efficiency :-), whether you return a slice or a reference to a slice
may be immaterial. A compiler with aggressive optimization may generate
inline code for your whole "read" function, making the object code
for the two methods equivalent.  When programming in Ada you have
given the compiler more information than programming in C, so it has
more opportunity to optimize.  Based on your return address, I would
presume folks in your shop are big on optimizing compilers.

Larry Kilgallen