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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,794c64d1f9164710 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-02-26 07:42:57 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.online.be!zur.uu.net!ash.uu.net!spool0900.news.uu.net!reader0901.news.uu.net!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3C7BAD52.4050208@mail.com> Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 10:44:18 -0500 From: Hyman Rosen User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:0.9.8+) Gecko/20020214 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: functions, packages & characters References: <20020221130715.12738.00000034@mb-bg.aol.com> <3C753C66.8020509@mail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Organization: KBC Financial Products Cache-Post-Path: master.nyc.kbcfp.com!unknown@mosquito.nyc.kbcfp.com X-Cache: nntpcache 2.3.3 (see http://www.nntpcache.org/) NNTP-Posting-Host: 204.253.250.10 X-Trace: 1014738176 reader1.ash.ops.us.uu.net 14446 204.253.250.10 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:20460 Date: 2002-02-26T10:44:18-05:00 List-Id: David Starner wrote: > Why? I can think of many cases where the normal case may be 40-50 > characters, but for robustness, you need the possibility of handling > lines 1500 characters long. No, no, a thousand times no! If what you are writing is at all general purpose, with the inputs not strictly under your control, do the world a favor and don't limit input buffer size to any fixed value. If nothing else, fixing the buffer size means that you must introduce logic to handle the case where the input is longer. Then you have to document the limit, and document what happens in the exceptional case. It's all extra work to make the code *less* useful, so why do it that way?