From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,f6f130eea077b8f8 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-05-24 15:00:19 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed!wn13feed!wn12feed!worldnet.att.net!204.127.198.203!attbi_feed3!attbi.com!rwcrnsc53.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3ECFEB59.4010401@attbi.com> From: "Robert I. Eachus" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: AI-248 and counting the elements in an external file References: <$YW1v+vxIWob@eisner.encompasserve.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.62.164.137 X-Complaints-To: abuse@attbi.com X-Trace: rwcrnsc53 1053813613 24.62.164.137 (Sat, 24 May 2003 22:00:13 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 22:00:13 GMT Organization: AT&T Broadband Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 22:00:13 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:37738 Date: 2003-05-24T22:00:13+00:00 List-Id: 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!