Re: End_Of_File does not work as expected...

[Mats Weber <matsw@mail.com>]

I find Jeff Carter's reply overly pedantic and paternalistic, given the
reasonable question being asked. And students are welcome to this newsgroup.

Now to the point: If you are used to C and UNIX text files, then Text_IO
is definitely something different. On some systems, (e.g. VMS) a line
terminator is not encoded as a character as it is on UNIX, but as the
end of a record. Text_IO was designed to accomodate such systems as well.

If you want to write the equivalent of UNIX's echo using Text_IO, you
must follow the complete file structure including lines and pages:

while not End_Of_File loop
   while not End_Of_Page loop
      while not End_Of_Line loop
         Get(c);
         Put(c);
      end loop;
      Skip_Line;   -- can be omitted.
      New_Line;
   end loop;
   Skip_Page;   -- can be omitted.
   New_Page;
end loop;

You can omit the page stuff if you don't need it, but you will have to
use End_Of_Line and New_Line because otherwise your output file is going
to be a single line.

Note that if you use End_Of_Page/New_Page, then you will have a page
terminator at the end of your output file even though the input file has
none. My advice: ignore pages in Text_IO.