From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham
	autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Thread: 103376,bed2755a22ee69a,start
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
Path: 
 g2news2.google.com!news3.google.com!news.glorb.com!news-peer-lilac.gradwell.net!not-for-mail
From: Rob Norris <firstname.lastname@baesystems.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Text Processing in Ada 95
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 18:09:09 +0000
Message-ID: <l22pt2114r910becfeg00e1dl1vb7flesq@4ax.com>
X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 3.3/32.846
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: glkas0286.greenlnk.net
NNTP-Posting-Host: 20.133.0.1
X-Trace: 1172081336 news.gradwell.net 757 dnews/20.133.0.1:57947
X-Complaints-To: news-abuse@gradwell.net
Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:9375
Date: 2007-02-21T18:09:09+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Suppose I have a text file such as:

tom
dick
harry

Then I want to insert the line "dave" after tom so the file is

tom
dave
dick
harry

Also suppose text file can get rather large.

Currently I'm using text_io which means I have to copy the whole thing into memory, insert the line
then over write the file with new contents. direct_io is not an option (varing string lengths)

What alternatives should I consider for making insertions faster?
(NB retrieval of a line needs to be fairly quick as well).

Thanks in advance.