Re: functions, packages & characters

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Wait a minute...... I seem to recall a nifty example of how you could return
an arbitrary length string from a function that used Get/Get_Line (?) and
recursed in the event that the line was longer than the buffer. It might be
in a code example somewhere like on AdaPower? If you can do that, why not a
similar subprogram for Unbounded_String? It would be even easier and not
require recursion since you could just keep reading some arbitrary sized
buffer in a loop and appending it to an Unbounded_String that is returned to
the caller.

Speed may be an issue, but with a reasonably large buffer, I don't think it
would be unacceptably slow. Why would you have to read it one character at a
time? (I will admit that I have not tried anything like this, so there may
be some tiny devil in the details that I'm missing...)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote in message
news:u7b1g6cooeo49@corp.supernews.com...
>
> Text_IO doesn't have direct support for unbounded strings (because
> having it would drag the unbounded string library into almost every
> program, whether you used it or not). Possibly, there ought to be a
> Get_Line for Unbounded strings in a child package of Text_IO (but this
> does not exist in Ada 95). This would be quite a bit slower than the
> regular Get_Line for long lines, but it could be made acceptably fast
> for the common case of short lines. It is possible to write such a
> Get_Line out of the primitives in Text_IO, but the result would be
> unacceptably slow (because you would have to read a character at a
> time - you can't use Get_Line because you can't tell between the case of
> a line which exactly fills the buffer and a line which is too long and
> does not -- but in the former case, the line terminator is skipped).
>