Re: Ada Streams usage (was Escape Sequences in Strings)

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

What a bright and clever guy you must be! What company did you say you worked
for? They must be lucky to have you on staff and they must have a real eye for
talent. I'll bet they have a real powerhouse of a team as a result. Its clear
they know how to hire the very best. I'm sure when someone does business with
your company, they really get their money's worth! :-) :-) :-)

Streams are a really powerful mechanism especially for communication stuff. My
only real gripe is with some low level issues such as representation (not a
problem in many cases) and the potential overhead problems for hard-real-time
applications.

I've done some things with streams, etc., for Winsock applications. If you get
curious about it and maybe want to give me some opinions on it, we should talk.
Drop me a note when you get a minute.

MDC



"Marc A. Criley" wrote:

> Streams were an excellent addition to the Ada 95 standard and have
> proven to
> be very useful and flexible.
>
> Not only does one get all the benefits of a stream-based approach, but
> by
> extending the Root_Stream_Type via inheritance and implementing one's
> own
> Read() and Write() subprograms, one can employ stream-based
> communication
> via any available communication medium, not just files.
>
> I've done this for sockets, and so now I can output to a socket by doing
> something along the lines of:
>
>    Type_Name'Write(Socket_Stream, Item);
>
> with a corresponding 'Read on the other end.  Naturally 'Output and
> 'Input are also available and have been used.
>
> And of course I can change the transport mechanism if necessary by
> modifying the extension of Root_Stream_Type.  ("Socket_Stream" was used
> for illustrative purposes, you don't necessarily want to include an
> indication of the internals of an activity within its name.)
>
> A number of cool additions were made to Ada 95, things like Streams and
> the Distributed Systems Annex, that I have found are so straightforward
> to
> use that it's not unusual to have small, experimental prototypes working
> the first time they're run.
>
> Marc A. Criley
> Senior Staff Engineer
> Quadrus Corporation

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================