Re: AI-248 and counting the elements in an external file

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@attbi.com>]

Larry Kilgallen wrote:

> Meaning it is permissible to return the number of 512-byte disk blocks
> (or file-specific-size tape blocks) for this function on VMS ?  Or is the
> answer supposed to be normalized to bytes even though the number of
> overhead bytes required (and thus the file size) will vary, for instance,
> when copying a file from disk to tape ?

Let me answer differently.  VMS supports many file formats.  Ada stream 
files would map nicely to VMS record oriented ANSI tape files.  There 
are other VMS formats that I would not tend to support stream files for. 
  You could do the blocking and unblocking in the file system, but why 
not use the OS to do what it does best, and only try to read and write 
file types that support stream semantics as stream files.

What if the program needs one type of file, and you have the data in 
another?  Write a program to read the file in and write it in as the 
necessary file type.  Won't be the first time I had to do that.  I 
remember one case where I had to distribute a data file to several 
projects.  One file format covered all the Unix systems, but I needed 
three different formats for the three groups with VAXen.  One of them 
actually overrode the default block size with 4K. (To save tape.) Argh!