Re: Advice on low level file handling.

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@acm.org>]

"Peter C. Chapin" <pchapin@sover.net> writes:

> In other words: I probably need to treat the file as a blob of 
> unstructured, typeless data and impose structure on it at run time rather 
> than with compile time declarations. 

Yes, that is typically the case when reading files of data.

> This seems somewhat contrary to the ideals of strong typing, but I'm
> not sure I see a good alternative in a case like this. I suppose
> this is why practical strongly typed languages have escapes from
> their typing mechanisms. This problem must come up frequently when
> writing programs that conform to externally defined binary
> standards.

Yes. For one fairly well structured solution, see
http://www.toadmail.com/~ada_wizard/ada/sal.html , particularly the
"network_order" packages (sal-network_order.ads, sal-*-network_order.*).


-- 
-- Stephe