Re: How to get a character?

["David C. Hoos, Sr." <david.c.hoos.sr@ada95.com>]

Ben Barth wrote in message <370EE07D.67C71458@dave-world.net>...
>I was wondering if there was a way to get a character in Ada from the
>user such as the getchar() function that can be used in C.  I'm trying
>to add a stop after displaying some information to the screen so the
>user can press any key to continue with the program.  I used the
>Text_IO.Get() function but that didn't seem to work very well.
>
If you really want him to just press any key, and only one key,
then in Ada95, you can use text_io.Get_immediate -- the one with only
one parameter.  This procedure will not return until the user types
some (any) character.

If using Ada83, then, without resorting to some OS-specific or
compiler-specific code, you would use text_io.Get_Line.  However,
this will require a <return> character to return from the call.
You could, of course simply say "Press return to Continue."

>I was also wondering if there was a way to format output to the screen
>ala C which uses "\t" for a tab.
>
This one's the same in Ada83 and Ada95:

If I wanted to move to the next "tab stop" where the "stops" are at
intervals of N columns, I would do
Ada.Text_IO.Set_Col (((Ada.Text_IO.Col + N) mod N) + 1);

(of course leave off the Ada. prefix if using Ada83).