Re: Platform portable support of heir. file systems

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Paul asked

"I was just working on one of our support packages that interfaces to the
host OS to do file I/O and can't find any support in the Ada Annex set for
a portable way of accessing heir. file systems.  I need things like
"MakeDirectory", "RemoveDirectory", etc.

Am I missing something, or is it the case that there is no Ada Annex
covering this very common need?

If there is no Annex support, is the ARA working on some kind of industry
agreement about such things?
"



This is obviously operating system dependent, and not something that one
would expect in an OS independent language definition (as a point of
comparison, ANSI C does not support these operations either).

So you expect to find these operations supported in standard libraries.
In the case of Ada 95, there are two possibilities. You can either use
a standard Posix interface if one is available, or you can call the
C library routines directly using appropriate Import pragmas. Either
approach will lead to well defined, portable code.