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From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: C getchar() functionality in Ada
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Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:24:32 -0500
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Date: 2009-02-17T15:24:32-05:00
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Thomas Locke wrote:
> But I understand what you're saying: No end of line characters in Ada!
> Except perhaps when using Get_Immediate and Look_Ahead?

The Ada design has the same error here as Pascal did.
End of Line and End of File are like a craps table;
you can know whether the table *was* hot or cold, but
you cannot know whether the table *will be* hot or
cold. Similarly, you cannot know whether you are at
end of line or end of file until you have tried reading
a character. Ada pretends otherwise, but behind the
scenes it's doing a secret character read-ahead, which
is what causes the odd behavior.

I speak about the various modern OSes. Presumably, once
upon a time input was such that this paradigm made sense,
just like Fortran had special output formatting characters
to rotate the roll of paper.