Re: functions, packages & characters

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Unversed Angel wrote:
>  Line_Buffer : String (1 .. 1000);

It's the twenty-first century. Isn't it about time we
got rid of fixed-size input buffers? Thank goodness
for the GNU reimplementation of the UNIX utilities,
which have done away with maximum line sizes, but on
my Sun, I still can't vi in a 200 column xterm.

Unless you have very domain-specific information,
using a fixed-size input buffer is an invitation
to errors. You will never pick a large-enough size.
I once had to process a .newsrc file, which is plain
text, whose longest line was several hundred thousand
characters long. The most pernicious error in such a
case is for the program to silently truncate the line,
or to split it into multiple lines. Using unbounded
input buffers prevents this from happening.