Re: Get_Line

[John English <je@brighton.ac.uk>]

Preben Randhol wrote:
> 
> John English wrote:
> > Robert A Duff wrote:
> >>
> >> Whether or not you like my Get_Line idea, surely you must admit that
> >> beginners and experts are troubled by the current Text_IO interface.
> >
> > IMHO, the big problem with Text_IO is the line-oriented nature of the
> > library (a la Pascal). C-style character-oriented I/O is so much easier
> > to deal with!
> 
> Why?

Example: copying a text file involves either processing characters
and calling End_Of_Line to know when to call New_Line, or using
Get_Line and checking received buffer sizes to know when to call
New_Line. You can't just stream characters without regard to line
breaks.

It's also hard to deal with multi-line strings. In C, these just have
embedded '\n' characters. In Ada, you can't just use '\n' (or ASCII.LF)
because although it'll work on Unix systems, you have to use ASCII.CR
on Macs and ASCII.CR & ASCII.LF on Windows (whereas C libraries will
translate to/from '\n' automatically). So you can't just treat a line
break as just another character in a portable way.

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