Re: Thinking of using Ada for a job at home. Couple of questions first.

[John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk.nospam>]

John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk.nospam> wrote:

>>I think I agree with Dmitry, "reading the octet stream or else what is
>>natural for the device or the protocol at hand, and then constructing
>>the necessary Ada objects on the fly".

>Thanks for that. I'll bear it in mind but, as I sort of mentioned, for
>this synth and for the purposes I want it it looks like the data is a
>fixed length, and they're all terminated with EOX anyway.

>That is unless (as I hope is NOT the case) any other MIDI data is
>interspersed with the SysEx messages. I would hope not but you never
>know. Guess it depends on a number of things.

Just checked the MIDI implementation doc; the SysEx messages are all
fixed length starting with a Status octet (16#F0# - nearly gave away
what I've been using recently by writing 0xF0 there :-) and ending in
EOX (16#F7#). Those are the only two octets in the stream that will
have their most significant bit set so I'd need to check anything that
comes in with a set MSB and dump it unless it's a status or EOX octet.
Everything else in the meantime can be shoved in the buffer until the
number of bytes I expect are received.

In saying that, it suggests that, as I'm only ever interested in SysEx
messages I've explicitly requested, then I should be in a position to
just create an object of the expected message type and fill it in on
the fly anyway.

Thanks for that.