=?utf-8?Q?Yannick_Duch=C3=AAne_=28Hibou57?= =?utf-8?Q?=29?= expounded in
news:op.vcig7go1ule2fv@garhos: 

> Le Mon, 10 May 2010 22:56:11 +0200, Maciej Sobczak  
> <see.my.homepage@gmail.com> a écrit:
>> Coming back to I/O - what I miss in Ada is the equivalent of fread in
>> C - that is, an operation that reads *up to* the given number of
>> bytes. Or maybe there is something that I didn't notice?

> It's there : look at [ARM 2005 13.13.1] which defines the package  
> Ada.Streams, which in turn contains the following :
> 
>     type Root_Stream_Type is abstract tagged limited private;
>     ...
>     type Stream_Element is mod implementation-defined;
>     ...
...
> Well, to be honest, this is not exactly the same as with C, as  
> Ada.Streams.Stream_Element is implementation defined (which is good,  
> because this is indeed platform dependent), so you will need ..

All this is well and good for applications that can work in 
"implementation defined" units of type Stream_Element. A pragma
won't fix the problem should it be different than a byte. Granted,
it will never likely come up on the platforms I have in mind.

But I do believe a POSIX friendly version of this should exist. 
Then the entire issue goes away. Under the hood, if the types work
out the to the same size as a byte, you can capitalize on that
in an implementation dependendant way.

Anything that makes Ada more posix friendly, helps its general
acceptance.

Warren