Re: Portable way to read/write from a binary file?

[Dale Stanbrough <dale@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>]

I wrote:
>In article <Cw717J.66q@alsys.com> , kst@alsys.com writes:
>>For Ada 94 (assuming X=4 8-)}), I think Stream_IO does what you want.
>>
>
>Unfortunately not (as I read it!)
>Each object in a stream has a tag appended to it so that the 
>procedure S'Class'Read can reconstruct the value from the tag 
>contained within the stream (13.13.2.14).

Keith Thompson emailed a correction to this; what I said is true only
for tagged types.
I had previously skimmed over streams in the LRM and produced a particularly 
premature perception of how it performs. When Keith posted his original reply
I opened up the LRM to the section I quoted - the only bit which did agree with
how I thought it worked! (Damn!   !:-(   ).

So here's a question that I couldn't find the answer to (no more posturing
about how it does work from me! :-). Does a stream of heterogenous scalar
elements have any encoding so that you can decide what the byte stream
represents, or does the format of the data in a stream have to be previously
determined?

Dale
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dale Stanbrough, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia, dale@rmit.edu.au
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