Re: Thoughts on the recent ICFP contest

[tmoran@acm.org]

> I thought that 'Write recursively used
> all the component 'Writes to pack the
> object into a stream, and then the
> possibly dispatching operations of the
> stream would determine the method of
> transmission.
  Yes 'Write is called recursively, but all it does is make a bunch of
calls to routines taking an access to stream and the particular item.
Commonly those routines write the value to successive positions in
a stream_element_array or to an IO device, but they don't have to.
Ultimately you get a bunch of calls to
Write(your_child_of_Root_Stream_Type, Stream_Element_Array).
If that routine merely adds one to a global counter, and quite ignores
the Stream_Element_Array, then you have a "component counter", not
an IO operation.
Claw has a Marshalling thing
  type Buffer_Type(Initial_Length : Ada.Streams.Stream_Element_Count)
    is new Ada.Streams.Root_Stream_Type with private;
and Claw.Sockets has, for instance,
  procedure Output(Socket  : in out Datagram_Type;
                   Item    : in out Claw.Marshalling.Buffer_Type;
                   Address : in     Network_Address_Type := System_Supplied_Address;
                   Port    : in     Port_Type := 0);
specifically to let you do a bunch of short writes into a marshalling
buffer, then do one socket write of that buffer.