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: 103376,55a8252137b5ef97 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news4.google.com!news.glorb.com!cyclone1.gnilink.net!gnilink.net!cyclone.southeast.rr.com!news-west.rr.com!news.rr.com!news-server.columbus.rr.com!fe2.columbus.rr.com.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "John B. Matthews" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Efficiently setting up large quantities of constant data References: <32di5rF3lj4ggU1@individual.net> User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.4 (PPC Mac OS X) Message-ID: Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 02:32:28 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.31.62.213 X-Complaints-To: abuse@rr.com X-Trace: fe2.columbus.rr.com 1103250748 65.31.62.213 (Thu, 16 Dec 2004 21:32:28 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 21:32:28 EST Organization: Road Runner High Speed Online http://www.rr.com Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:7012 Date: 2004-12-17T02:32:28+00:00 List-Id: In article <32di5rF3lj4ggU1@individual.net>, "Marc A. Criley" wrote: > "Dr. Adrian Wrigley" wrote: > > > A similar question I have is how to link in regular files and access > > their contents in Ada. > > > > For example, suppose I have a binary file "distances.dat" containing > > the (road) distances between 1000 different cities. This could be a 2MB > > file computed by another application. How can I build a single executable > > file containing the data and access it from the Ada code? > > > > I presume this needs to be done at the linker stage, but I don't > > see any options to link in non-object files. The obvious alternative > > of distributing the data files separately and reading them in > > is slower and much less tidy than having a single self-contained binary. > > I don't know the answer to your real question about linking in such files, > but the way we dealt with this problem _many_ years ago with some very large > tables of math constants was to write a little tool that read in the file > and then generated Ada source code that initialized a suitably defined data > structure with the constants. (And I don't think we used big aggregates, > because they were...well...too big. I think we had the tool generate > thousands of assignment statements.) > > The generated file was quite large and took awhile to compile (it was 1985 > after all :-), but it worked just fine for us. Of course it was a one-shot > effort as well, since math constants don't change very often, so YMMV if > you're dealing with changing data. > > Marc A. Criley > McKae Technologies > www.mckae.com For several projects, we've used a script (SQL*Plus, PL/SQL, Java) to read from a database and generate executable code (Ada, Java). The script was part of the build, so each new release had the latest data. -- John jmatthews at wright dot edu www dot wright dot edu/~john.matthews/