Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!rex!lang
From: lang@pegasus.cs.tulane.edu (Raymond Lang)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: question about Orca/Pascal
Message-ID: <3860@rex.cs.tulane.edu>
Date: 13 Jul 90 23:16:11 GMT
Sender: news@rex.cs.tulane.edu
Organization: Computer Science Dept., Tulane Univ., New Orleans, LA
Lines: 20

I'm working on a text-based program for a client. The program was originally
in BASIC, but I wanted to change it to Pascal to make future maintenance
easier (I'm using Orca/Pascal).

The program uses two data files, one of which is an index into the other.
Here's where I get into problems. The Seek procedure was unacceptably slow
when locating the file pointer. So I thought I'd just read the entire data
file into a linked list of arrays and work like that. But it's taking over
an HOUR to read in the file (it's about 200K). It takes about a second to
read in each record from the data file (each record is a character string
of length 60).

Is this normal? Why does it take so long to do file access with Standard
Pascal procedures? Would this be faster if it used toolbox routines? More
to the point, is there a way to make it faster _without_ using toolbox
routines? (I'd like to keep this as non-machine specific as I can so I can
port it to a PC.)

Thanks,
Ray (lang@rex.cs.tulane.edu)