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7.2 Text_IO Suggestions

The Ada.Text_IO package has fairly high overheads due in part to the requirement of maintaining page and line counts. If performance is critical, a recommendation is to use Stream_IO instead of Text_IO for volume output, since this package has less overhead.

If Text_IO must be used, note that by default output to the standard output and standard error files is unbuffered (this provides better behavior when output statements are used for debugging, or if the progress of a program is observed by tracking the output, e.g. by using the Unix tail -f command to watch redirected output.

If you are generating large volumes of output with Text_IO and performance is an important factor, use a designated file instead of the standard output file, or change the standard output file to be buffered using Interfaces.C_Streams.setvbuf.