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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Computer Language Shootout
Date: 19 Jul 2003 15:04:14 -0400
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Pascal Obry <p.obry@wanadoo.fr> writes:

> Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> writes:
> 
> > "Jean-Pierre Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr> writes:
> > 
> > > This one reads a line with no length limit:
> > > 
> > > function Get_Line return String is
>   [...]
> >
> > Too bad this was not included in Text_IO itself.  It would save
> > beginners a lot of trouble.  Sigh.
> 
> But this approach can use a lot of stack space and become very slow.
> Returning an unconstraint object on the stack has a cost.

True, but I think the design goal of Text_IO ought to be correctness,
and convenience for the programmer, not efficiency.  I'm sick of
programs that have arbitrary line-length limits.  I'll happily pay a
little efficiency cost to correct that.  And in the cases where
efficiency matters, a different strategy can be used (namely, the
Get_Line that takes a fixed-length buffer, or a get-next-token kind of
approach, which doesn't care about line lengths).

- Bob