AI-248 and counting the elements in an external file

[Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen)]

I suppose my lack of experience with Ada95 streams ('read, etc.)
may be the reason for my confusion, but in reading

	http://www.ada-auth.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/AIs/AI-00248.TXT?rev=1.16

I see in several places the text:

	The size of an external file is the number of
	stream elements contained in the file.

That is straightforward for a file of some record type, or a file of
integers, but what if the file is one created with Ada95 stream semantics ?
I thought that 'write and write() relied upon the reading program to know
"how" to read the file, and that implementations would not have kept a
tally of how many elements were in the file.

I don't know enough about this to know if it is possible to do a linear
search of a file to count the elements, but even if it were, that would
be a very slow operation.

Is it envisioned by the authors of AI-248 that implementations would
preserve metadata containing the element count ?  If so, what about
stream files that were written under Ada95 ?  Or can someone suggest
what it is that I don't understand about Ada streams ?