Ada95: New_Page at end of file

Ada95: New_Page at end of file

[Tom Griest]

When closing a text file using Text_IO in the GNAT implementation of
Ada95, you always get an Ascii form feed appended to the file.  Is this
a new requirement for Ada9X, or did earlier Ada compilers just not do
this in general?  

This makes it impossible to use text_io to generate files that can be 
read by many other tools.  :-(    Is there anyway to get around this?
I tried to set_page_length to 0, but this has no effect.

-Tom

Re: Ada95: New_Page at end of file

[Robert Dewar]

The Ada standards (83 and 95) both require a page mark at the end of a
text file, and the representation of this page mark is implementation
dependent.

GNAT currently represents ALL page marks by form feed characters, including
the one at the end of the file.

This is not incorrect, but it is unfriendly, a more friendly, though
obviously slightly trickier, representation is to have the page mark at
the end of file have a different representation (namely null).

This is on our list of things to do.

However, please note that text files in Ada have implementation dependent
formats, and you cannot count on this as a transportable format without
additional, possibly implementation dependent, guarantees. See also the
URG discussion of this issue (perhaps Dave can supply us with the proper
UI number).