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From: defaria@hpclapd.HP.COM (Andy DeFaria)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Help!
Message-ID: <920033@hpclapd.HP.COM>
Date: 26 Sep 90 16:27:50 GMT
References: <9009241422.AA17160@wrdis01.af.mil>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Calif. Language Lab
Lines: 24

>/ hpclapd:comp.lang.ada / kmccook@WRDIS01.AF.MIL (Ken McCook;SCDQ;) /  6:52 am  Sep 23, 1990 /

>I'd prefer to write directly to the printer, but I could live
>with having to write to a file and then printing the file.

>I had hoped that Ada's Text_IO would have the capabilities 
>Turbo Pascal has for directing output directly to the printer 
>using Write and WriteLn? (And I'd hoped for direct keyboard
>reading as well like someone else on the net in recent days.
>Something like Turbo's "Read (kbd, X);".)

The  simple, quick  and  dirty answer is to  write  your  routines in Turbo
Pascal and pragma INTERFACE to them.  Write a general purpose TP routine to
Write_to_Printer and a  Read_From_Keyboard  then encapsulate  the interface
into an Ada package pragma INTERFACEing to your TP routines.

But you may  want to check  out the Ada way of  writing to a  file and have
that file point   to a printer.  I haven't   done this but  I'm sure   it's
possible. 

WRT  reading from the  keyboard, if you want anykind  of real control  over
what is read then you might want to interface to TP or TC or whatever.   If
you  are  simply   reading  in stuff   then  you could use  TEXT_IO.GET  or
TEXT_IO.GET_LINE.