unbound array?

["John Clarke" <jclarke@abit.com.au>]

Hello!

I was hoping someone could shed some light. I am writing an ADA program that
reads a file and counts the number of words in the text file and stores the
word length, of each word encountered, in an array. So for instance i have
defined:

size : integer := 100;
type length_type is array (1..size) of integer;
word_length : length_type;

Now, if the text file is: "A rat was here."

Hence, word_length(1) = 1, word_length(2) = 3, word_length(4) = 4 etc...

The problem I am facing is that I don't know how many words I will encounter
in the text file. I do not want to constrain size to 100 as I have above. I
know I can use unconstrained array type, but this also doesn't solve the
problem as an unconstrained array requires a predefined size assigned prior
to assigning values to it.

I know that size will never be greater than the number of characters in the
text file. But it would be a little ridiculous assigning "size" = "number of
characters in text file".

How can this problem be solved? Any help would be great.

Thanks
Peter