Re: Ada and Hardware

["Jeff Creem" <jeff@thecreems.com>]

"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:JLCK6.91$j65.11856@www.newsranger.com...
> In article <3AFACEC7.C2E67357@icn.siemens.de>, Alfred Hilscher says...
> >
> >Maybe the Windows API calls "CreateFile" and "DeviceIOControl" will be
> >what you are looking for ? Look for this excerpt from   MS-API
> ..
> >"You can use the CreateFile function to open a disk drive or a partition
> ..
> >\\.\A: Obtains a handle to drive A on the user's computer.
> >\\.\C: Obtains a handle to drive C on the user's computer."
>
> Interesting. One has to wonder if this would work with the standard Ada IO
> operations (eg: Ada.Streams.Stream_IO)...
>

I just had to know to. It looks like it does not work.

with Ada.Streams.Stream_IO;
with Ada.Streams;

procedure Show_It is

  Buffer : Ada.Streams.Stream_Element_Array (1 .. 2048) := (others => 0);


  File : Ada.Streams.Stream_IO.File_Type;

begin
  Ada.Streams.Stream_IO.Open
    (
    File => File,
    Name => "\\.\A:",
    Mode => Ada.Streams.Stream_IO.Out_File);

  Ada.Streams.Stream_IO.Write
    (
    File => File,
    Item => Buffer);

  Ada.Streams.Stream_IO.Write
    (
    File => File,
    Item => Buffer);

  Ada.Streams.Stream_IO.Write
    (
    File => File,
    Item => Buffer);

  Ada.Streams.Stream_IO.Close(File);
end Show_It;


Raises a name error on the open.  I tried a few quick variations on it.
(Including create instead
of open).