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From: tmoran@acm.org
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: 'Write attribute vs Write procedure.
References: <7vk7ck7iwc.fsf@vlinux.voxelvision.no>
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Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 16:22:55 GMT
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Date: 2003-05-21T16:22:55+00:00
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>>   Personally, I think using the default 'write is only reasonable
>> in the very simplest cases.  If something is big, or complicated,
>> I'd write my own 'write for it.
>
>Yes, but that removes much of the attraction of using a stream in the
>first place. It should only be necessary to do your own write if you
>wanted another representation of it in the external format.  A prime
>example of rendering a very nice feature of the language pretty much
>unusable because of a poor implementation.

  I disagree.  It is convenient when you use it that you needn't
distinguish between a 'write that will write in a canonical, vs a special
external format.  In the OP's case, it was probably simpler to get the
program up and running with the standard 'write, rather than having to
make his own, and then worry about doing something special as a matter of
performance tuning.

You also still have use at a higher level, eg
  type Sound_Bytes is record
    Time  : Ada.Calendar.Time;
    Audio : Wave;
    Title : String(1 .. 10);
  end record;
If you have a special Wave'write, you can say
  Sound_Bytes'write
and it will do the standard thing for Time and Name but call your
special routine for Audio, so you probably don't need to make your
own Sound_Bytes'write.  At it's own abstraction level, Sound_Bytes is
neither big nor complicated, so you probably don't need a special 'write.