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From: "Steve" <nospam_steved94@comcast.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
References: <el6jss$268$1@cernne03.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Get_Line problem (GNAT bug?)
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 19:34:42 -0800
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Date: 2006-12-06T19:34:42-08:00
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"Maciej Sobczak" <no.spam@no.spam.com> wrote in message 
news:el6jss$268$1@cernne03.cern.ch...
[snip]
>
> Any thoughts?
>
You have run across what I consider to be a weakness in the standard Text_IO 
library, it is one of the few things I find really annoying about Ada, which 
I really like otherwise.

In Ada you can't write a simple program to read and process lines in a text 
file that looks something like:

while not End_Of_File( inFile ) loop
    Get_Line( inFile, Input_Buffer, Count );
    Process_Line( Input_Buffer( 1 .. Count ) );
end loop;

The problem is that Get_Line reads a line of text into a string buffer and 
returns the count of characters read.  The "line of text" is defined by the 
next sequential characters from the current position of the file up to the 
next line terminator.  If the last character in the file doesn't happen to 
be a line termnator an End_Error exception is raised.

It would be much more useful if Get_Line read from the current position to 
the next line terminator OR end of file.  This is the way the other 
languages I have used work.  Because of the way the Get_Line function works 
you have to jump through a bunch of inefficient hoops like reading one 
character at a time in order to get the desired behavior.  In my opinion 
raising an exception when the end of file doesn't have an end of line 
terminator should be the exceptional case and not the rule.

I suspec this is the same problem you're running into with your interactive 
program.

Steve
(The Duck)


> -- 
> Maciej Sobczak : http://www.msobczak.com/
> Programming    : http://www.msobczak.com/prog/