Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!oucsace!bchurch
From: bchurch@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU (Bob Church)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: question about Orca/Pascal
Summary: Change the file type
Message-ID: <1550@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU>
Date: 15 Jul 90 04:29:36 GMT
References: <3860@rex.cs.tulane.edu>
Organization: Ohio University CS Dept., Athens
Lines: 31

In article <3860@rex.cs.tulane.edu>, lang@pegasus.cs.tulane.edu (Raymond Lang) writes:
> 
> 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).
> 
> Thanks,
> Ray (lang@rex.cs.tulane.edu)
 
I had a similar problem once and hope this helps. I don't know the specifics
but there is a lot involved with reading text files. It's as if the OS were
actually reading each line, checking for control codes etc. I changed the 
file type to binary which DOS (and I'm assuming other OS's) just reads in
as a block of data. This is *MUCH* faster. You would need to set up a 
some sort of system for reading in the data and then pointing your arrays
at it to then treat it as text. I realize this is extremely vague but
hopefully it can help point you in the right direction.


********************************************************************
*                                                                  *
*   bob church  bchurch@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu                       *
*                                                                  *
*  If economics isn't an "exact" science why do computers crash    *
*  so much more often than the stock market?                       *
*                                          bc                      *
********************************************************************