Re: SunAda question

[sarge!sarge!svh@uunet.uu.net (Steven Hovater)]

kanderso@mabillon.ICS.UCI.EDU (Kenneth Anderson) writes:

>Hello.  I am using the sunada-1.1 compiler and it came with a package
>unix defined in its standard library.  One of the subprograms defined
>in the package unix is

>        function gethostname(name: address; namelen: integer)
>                return status_code;

>As defined this function seems very useless.  It will only tell you whether
>or not the call to gethostname was successful.  It will not tell you,
>despite its name, what the hostname is.

>Two questions:

>  1. Anyone know why such a useless function would be included in
>     this package?

>  2. What is a good portable way of finding out the name of the machine
>     your program is running on?

>Thanks in advance,

>Ken Anderson

Hi Ken - not speaking officially here for Verdix, but for myself :)

Note that the function has an argument that's an address - that's the
key here. Some might argue that it's bad form to putz around modifying 
what are considered in many circles to be "in" only parameters, and I
won't get into that any further, but a quick answer to your question is
that the function (if successful) will return a nice status code in the
return value, and the name parameter (I did it very dirty below) gets modified
to contain the hostname. 

This is fairly portable, IMHO - since it's a pragma interface to the unix funct
ion of
the same name.

-----cut here----
with unix;
with text_io;

procedure gethost is 
        namelen : integer := 20;
        hostname : string (1..namelen);
        stat : unix.status_code;
begin

        stat := unix.gethostname(hostname'address,namelen);

        text_io.put_line ("Hostname is " & hostname);

end gethost;

--- cut here---

While this may not be the cleanest code, it gets the point across.
--
Steven V. Hovater                      (703)318-5839
Senior CASE Engineer                   
Verdix Corporation                     EMAIL: svh@verdix.com
-- 
Steven V. Hovater                      (703)318-5839
Senior CASE Engineer                   
Verdix Corporation                     EMAIL: svh@verdix.com