From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_DATE
	autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: 103376,da8a419b0e3fda81
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-09-21 14:18:14 PST
Path: 
 bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!gmi!msuinfo!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!aggedor.rmit.EDU.AU!goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au!dalesmac.cs.rmit.edu.au!dale
From: Dale Stanbrough <dale@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Portable way to read/write from a binary file?
Date: 20 Sep 1994 22:51:52 GMT
Organization: RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <35np28$4i2@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
References: <355kao$38d@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> <122484@cup.portal.com>
 <122506@cup.portal.com> <35iuqj$5dj@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: dalesmac.cs.rmit.edu.au
X-UserAgent: Version 1.1.3
X-XXMessage-ID: <AAA5A4BCA402785E@dalesmac.cs.rmit.edu.au>
X-XXDate: Wed, 21 Sep 94 16:52:12 GMT
Date: 1994-09-20T22:51:52+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

I wrote:
>In article <Cw717J.66q@alsys.com> , kst@alsys.com writes:
>>For Ada 94 (assuming X=4 8-)}), I think Stream_IO does what you want.
>>
>
>Unfortunately not (as I read it!)
>Each object in a stream has a tag appended to it so that the 
>procedure S'Class'Read can reconstruct the value from the tag 
>contained within the stream (13.13.2.14).

Keith Thompson emailed a correction to this; what I said is true only
for tagged types.
I had previously skimmed over streams in the LRM and produced a particularly 
premature perception of how it performs. When Keith posted his original reply
I opened up the LRM to the section I quoted - the only bit which did agree with
how I thought it worked! (Damn!   !:-(   ).

So here's a question that I couldn't find the answer to (no more posturing
about how it does work from me! :-). Does a stream of heterogenous scalar
elements have any encoding so that you can decide what the byte stream
represents, or does the format of the data in a stream have to be previously
determined?

Dale
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dale Stanbrough, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia, dale@rmit.edu.au
GNU Ada 94 (GNAT) => the best $0 you'll ever spend.
Available for DOS, Linux, OS/2, Sun Sparc, Sun Solaris, ...
Coming to a GNU supported platform near you soon...