Re: Reading a line of arbitrary length

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

Matthew said

<<Yes, it's true the heap is being implicitly allocated behind the scenes,
and that is exactly where I prefer to keep it.  In general, messing with
heap is dangerous business.  If it's a toss-up between a solution that
requires explicit heap allocation and a solution that hides that
allocation, then the latter solution wins.

Also, I'm assuming that implementations of Unbounded_String are going to
make heap-space allocation optimizations that won't necessarily apply to
using the new operator directly.>>

Of course in GNAT, the *entire* operation of reading a variable length
string is behind the scenes. A programmer using GNAT version 3.10 merely
writes:

with Ada.Strings.Unbounded.Text_IO; use Ada.Strings.Unbounded.Text_IO;

...

    S : Unbounded_String := Get_Line (file);

and that's the end of it.