Re: Text_IO for other standard types

["Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96" <condicma@PWFL.COM>]

"Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei@ONLINE.NO> writes:
>Oh Horror! With these changes one could write a portable text editor in
>Ada without any host specific code. Horrors of horrors; we would be able
>to turn off input buffering and get access to each character as they are
>typed. Transparantly.
>
    An admirable goal. I'm not sure that the facilities aren't already
    available in Text_IO to write a transparent text editor (Please
    make it look like TPU!) but it may be lack of consistent
    implementation that kills you. You can do cursor motion now by
    outputting escape sequences - except that you are then dependent
    on some specific terminal standard (VT100, usually). There is a
    "Get_Immediate" call which will let you read a keystroke at a
    time, but my experience is that it's implementation is a little
    inconsistent/buggy/slow. (Does it require echoing of the
    character? Shouldn't it not require a CR before reading the
    keystroke? What about "special" keys, like F-keys, arrows, ctrl,
    alt, etc?) Again, your code is likely to get hung up on a specific
    keyboard standard as well.
>
>It would be very nice to have a stream base standard library. I assume
>it would be easy to connect any stream to any sort of I/O (serial,
>socket, text files, etc).
>
    Don't forget that there is, in fact support for streams and
    Stream_IO, the goal of which was to give you exactly the ability
    you are talking about. Of course there are always limitations on
    this sort of thing because it becomes very hardware/os dependent.

    MDC

Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer     Voice:     561.796.8997
Pratt & Whitney GESP, M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600  Fax:       561.796.4669
West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600                  Internet:  CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
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