Re: functions, packages & characters

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

I think the situation would be to use something like a 1500 character buffer
& go 'round the block to reallocate the Unbounded_String if and only if the
line length exceeded the 1500 characters. That way, the only time you'd
force any reallocations upon appending to the Unbounded_String would be the
case where the line length is greater than the 1500 characters of the
buffer. It would perform fast for most of the cases and probably wouldn't
perform too bad for the few cases where the line exceeded the buffer.

If you're going to Text_IO, you really need to have some kind of fixed
length string into which you read. Hence the need for *some* buffer limit -
but not necessarly a limit on the line length of the what the program can
accept.

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/


"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message
news:3C7C7E2D.6090602@mail.com...
> David Starner wrote:
> > 1500 was meant as an arbitrarily large value.
>
> No arbitrary value is large enough. You *must* provide
> for input buffer size limited only by memory constraints,
> or you will cause some innocent user needless grief.
>
> As I said before, my troublesome case was a .newsrc file,
> plain text, where one line was several hundred thousand
> characters long. Fortunately, I was using tools which
> handled it with aplomb.
>