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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Get_Line problem (GNAT bug?)
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2006 17:50:50 -0500
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Date: 2006-12-07T17:50:50-05:00
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"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:

> No. It is the concept, which is broken. And that wasn't Ada, who broke it,
> but crippled operating systems like Windows and Unix. In a proper OS the
> line terminator is not a character.

Why do you say so?  The concept of "sequence of characters", which
includes blanks and end-of-line chars, seems pretty good to me.
(Other control chars, such as tabs, should be banished to the far
side of the moon.)

I think the Unix idea -- "line terminator (or separator?) = a particular
character" -- is a pretty convenient model.  It's certainly convenient
for parsing input text: read one char at a time, and deal with it,
treating end-of-line as one possible case.  E.g., an Ada compiler
typically works that way.

How much human intellectual effort has been wasted by having to deal
with "text mode" versus "binary mode" ftp?!  The unix model makes them
identical, and if all operating systems had magically agreed on that
from the dawn of time, we'd all be better off.

To represent end-of-line as TWO characters is just plain stupid.
Even a manual typewriter has a single lever that does both (returns the
carriage, and feeds the line).

Note: I don't know of any Ada compiler that uses Text_IO to read the Ada
source code to be compiled.

- Bob