Re: Preferred way to do binray I/O on standard input/output stream

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.acm.org>]

Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne) wrote:
> 
> There is no kind of binary mode vs text mode flags with Ada stream/
> file IO, as it there are with C. And then, C files are not typed,
> while Ada files/streams are, thus, this will not make any sense to
> simply talk about binary I/O with Ada. So let simply talk about non-
> text I/O from and to standard input/output.
> 
> When some people need this, what is the typical preferred to do so ?

Package Ada.Text_IO.Text_Streams (ARM A.12.2) allows converting 
Ada.Text_IO.File_Type to Stream_Access and reading and writing them through the 
capabilities of streams. This allows converting standard input and output to 
Stream_Access, since Ada.Text_IO provides the functions Standard_Input and 
Standard_Output which return Ada.Text_IO.File_Type.

For general binary I/O, one can use Ada.Sequential_IO or Ada.Direct_IO 
instantiated with an appropriate type, or Ada.Streams.Stream_IO. For standard 
input and output, however, this can only work if you have a name for these files 
that you can use to open them, and such a name is platform-dependent. The only 
independent way to access these files is through streams and 
Ada.Text_IO.Text_Streams.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Drown in a vat of whiskey. Death, where is thy sting?"
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
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