Re: Ada x <whatever> Datagram Sockets

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:

> "Simon Wright" <simon@pushface.org> wrote in message 
> news:lyef8iy9dj.fsf@pushface.org...
>> "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
>>
>>> Note that Ada 2020 will have a package FIFO_Streams
>>
>> Names are in short supply - but - is there an implication there that
>> streams in general need not be FIFO? (I can just about see that you
>> might have some form of FIFO-within-priority ordering, though that
>> does seem to be a bit of a perversion of the underlying idea)
>
> We tried a lot of names and FIFO was the winner. I'm not sure it is
> very descriptive of what the package actually does.

I called it Memory_Streams, e.g.
https://github.com/simonjwright/coldframe/blob/master/lib/coldframe-memory_streams.ads

The main use was to allow messages for UDP streams to be prepared
simply, as discussed above, so the typical usage was

   declare
      a Memory_Stream instance of the appropriate size
   begin
      fill the Memory_Stream instance
      write its contents to the UDP stream[1]
   end

A further benefit of using streams was that we were communicating
between machines of different endianness, and GNAT contains an optional
stream implementation that will transparently convert to/from network
byte order.

[1] not sure that FIFO_Streams offers this without copying the contents
out?