mark lewis wrote in a message to Michele Marie Dalene:

 WG>> Maximus and Squish will continue to support *.MSG areas (in
 WG>> fact, I have more confidence in them than Squish bases right now ;).

 MMD>         Thats cool. only is there a *.msg renumbering tool such as
 MMD> 170renum.exe? If I had to switch to *.msg bases I would
 MMD> really need such a tool. I don't rember if squish had such
 MMD> an option for *.msg format.

 ml> why would you /have/ to renumber? the DOS 8.3 system can count from
 ml> 0 thru 99999999 before wrapping... that's a lot of messages :wink: 
 ml> imagine that on a system that handles long file names... them
 ml> numbers would get pretty large before a renumber was required...

Because with *.MSG being stored one message-per-file,  the software (at
least some of it) would look for each and every number,  starting from 1, 
by way of dos filesystem calls,  which was very slow and inefficient. 
Putting them all together with consecutive low numbers does away with this
problem.

OTOH so would a linked list...

 ml> FWIW: i have _not_ renumbered my message areas in almost a
 ml> decade... 

And you're using *.msg?

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