Re: CRC in Ada?

[Graham Hughes <graham.hughes@resnet.ucsb.edu>]

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ohk@edeber.tfdt-o.nta.no (Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen FOU.TD/DELAB) writes:
>It may be a mistake in some cases, but talking about "this mistake" is
>a vast oversimplification. Surely, there is nothing conceptually wrong
>with having a set of single character IO operations like putc, getc,
>and ungetc?

One important point here, in agreement with what you say: for a lot of
stuff (e.g., about 80% of the stuff I program routinely), text I/O is a
major portion of the code.  Things like scanners, editors, filters, and
others all require a good I/O interface, but also are most convenient
when read a character at a time.

When the standard libraries do buffering automatically, we win.
Low-level escapes like read() and write() could be retained, but having
fread() and cousins as a part of the library means that I don't have to
go implementing a buffering routine every time I want to do something
trivial.  If somebody wants buffering off, then let them, but most
programs will want buffering.

Personally, if I'm going to have to work around GNAT not having I/O
buffering, I'm probably going to write it in Icon, Perl, C, C++,
Python, or any of a hundred other languages that do this for me.  My
time is better spent coding, not writing buffers, and I'm going to have
to write buffers just for the sake of program speed.
- -- 
Graham Hughes (graham.hughes@resnet.ucsb.edu)
http://A-abe.resnet.ucsb.edu/~graham/ -- MIME & PGP mail OK.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by 
	stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor

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