Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message
news:yStEh.6202$iF.2036@trndny03...
...
> There ought to be a Get_Line which returns an Unbounded_String (did
> I get that right?), so that space for it comes from the heap instead
> of the stack.

There is such a Get_Line (see A.10.12). But I don't think that really helps.

> And yes, I know it's a security issue because someone
> can feed the program unbounded input and have it chew up large chunks
> of RAM, but sometimes you really do need unbounded lengths on your
> input lines. I've often posted the example of a .newsrc file I had
> where a line of interest was well over 100,000 characters long.

...and you know why. Note that a regular unconstrained String returned from
a function is allocated from the heap in Janus/Ada (we only allocate
static-sized things on the stack). But that doesn't help either. The problem
is that if it doesn't fit, you can't recover because there is no way to know
how much of the file was read before you ran out of memory. Of course, if
you don't want to recover, it's not an issue - so it makes sense to have
both possibilities.

And in neither case (String or Unbounded_String) is the memory going to
disappear - it will get recovered quickly. (There is a danger that the
momentary lack of memory could cause some other task in the program to
fail - so again you do have to think about the consequences.)

                           Randy.