Hi, Keith.

KR> On (11 Jun 95) Paul Edwards wrote to Bob Lawrence...

KR>  BL> Ahh... I've just discovered blockread() and buffers. It's much
KR>  BL> faster this way.

KR>  PE> Is that part of the Pascal standard?

KR>  BL>   It's Turbo Pascal, I think. Pacal is weak on reading files.

KR>  PE> ie, no.

KR> if i remember correctly, the original pascal standard contained no i/o
KR> statements, it was purely a teaching aid.

No, you could declare something as File of , where  is any
pre-defined or user-defined type, including structures, and you could
read or write such files.

There was also the Text type, equivalent to File of Char, which allowed
formatted reads and writes, and the ReadLn & WriteLn forms, which read
up to a cr/lf or write one, respectively.

Two predeclared files were defined, Input and Output, automatically
assigned to the equivalent of StdIn and StdOut on whatever system you
were using.

Turbo Pascal has added the untyped file, the BlockRead & BlockWrite
statements which allow buffering, and random access through the Seek
procedure (I don't *think* that was in the original). And more recently,
Stream i/o, although I suppose you could argue that that's just by
providing a library with the relevant functions & procedures in, like
C's libraries.

Regards, FIM.
@EOT:

---