Re: Mneson announcement and help request

[Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <2f8p9c.0p5.ln@skymaster>, "Jean-Pierre Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr> writes:
> 
>> "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote in message
>> news:-NSdneXjh7wndyLdRVn-vw@megapath.net...
>> > My point was that as long as you keep the exception handler and raising
>> out
>> > of the loop (which is certainly true for EOF), it can be quite efficient.
>> In
>> > the normal case (where you read many characters before reaching the end of
>> > the file), it's almost always better to handle the exception. That's
>> because
>> > one exception raise/handling pair is a lot cheaper than 10,000 function
>> > calls, especially one as expensive as EOF.
> 
> I always use the exception mechanism for another reason:
> In the presence of a "malformed" file (i.e. one where the last line has no line terminator before EOF), you may have an unexpected
> End_Error even if End_Of_File was false. Of course, this is outside Ada semantics, but it's the real world that text files are
> sometimes being typed by human beings....

That seems to be restricted to operating systems where the file system
does not handle record semantics.