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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Re: Binary files vs Portablity vs Ada
Date: 1999/11/05
Message-ID: <1999Nov4.212826.1@eisner>#1/1
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References: <7vt67r$qv0$1@coward.ks.cc.utah.edu>
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Organization: LJK Software
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-11-05T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <7vt67r$qv0$1@coward.ks.cc.utah.edu>, nahaj@u.cc.utah.edu (John Halleck) writes:

>   It is not hard to do something that just grabs bytes from a file
>   until done, but that assumes the file is some multiple of eight
>   bits long, and that all data for the file is in the bytes returned.
>   On machines like the Sperry 1100 series, the native word size is
>   36 bits (Usually chopped into four nine-bit bytes for Text use)
>   And the file is "control word -> image"  instead of "embeded
>   control."
> 
>   Can this be done portabily?  (I suspect not, but I'm not an Ada
>   expert.)  I have something that seems to work for PC's, Mac's, 
>   and Unix boxes, but it bugs me that I don't know how to do it in
>   any general way.

Does your Mac version do the resource fork or just the data fork ?

Windows NT (NTFS) actually supports more than two forks, although
most programs don't make use of them.

On VMS, you would have to decide what treatment you would give to
various file organizations and record formats provided by the
operating system.

On MVS, I get the feeling that dealing with a "partitioned data
set" would not be at all portable to anything.

So hardware data size is not your only issue.

Larry Kilgallen