Re: GNAT's Text_IO & empty files

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

G D Montmollin asks

<<My question is:
Is it a (a) text file formatting question or (b) a file terminator
question  ? The (b) point of view would be that Text_IO tries
to have a line feed at the end of each text file, although
the only explicit (and facultative) file terminator seems to be the
EOF character. Mine is (a) and I feel it's both harmless and
profitable to comment out the lines following this remark in procedure
Terminate_Line:

    --  For files other than standard error and standard output, we
    --  make sure that an empty file has a single line feed, so that
    --  it is properly formatted. We avoid this for the standard files
    --  because it is too much of a nuisance to have these odd line
    --  feeds when nothing has been written to the file.

         elsif (File /= Standard_Err and then File /= Standard_Out)
           and then (File.Line = 1 and then File.Page = 1)
         then
            New_Line (File);
         end if;

Comments ?... Reactions ?...
>>

Most certainly if you comment these lines out, your resulting runtime will
not be compliant with annex A of the reference manual. These lines were not
put in for amusement!