Re: GNAT/Ada95 Streams Performance Issue

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

Larry Hazel <lhhazel@otelco.net> wrote in message news:<3D585F63.6010205@otelco.net>...

> Somewhere around 1990, I wrote a simple file copy program 
> using Sequential_IO on 
> files of bytes.

Note that there is no portable way of doing this in either
Ada 83 or Ada 95. In practice, instantiating SIO for type
Character would probably work.

> This was using the Verdix Ada 83 compiler on a Sun.  I 
> did this as a test  because C people kept telling me how 
> slow Ada was.  I wanted to see for myself. 
> It was consistently faster than the unix cp command.

Hard to believe, and if true, simply a comment on a truly
appalling implementation of cp.

> I suspect there was a 
> lot of buffering going on behind the scenes.

That's not enough to account for this surprising result!