Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!samsung!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!cica!iuvax!maytag!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Cnews artnum in active file
Message-ID: <1990Aug17.213612.8160@looking.on.ca>
Date: 17 Aug 90 21:36:12 GMT
References: <1990Aug16.185023.26200@squirrel.mh.nl> <1990Aug17.034849.17801@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Aug17.071243.16518@looking.on.ca> <1990Aug17.163437.2013@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 17

In article <1990Aug17.163437.2013@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>there is a nearly-contiguous sequence between min and max.  The code to do
>this has to be present anyway, since no reader in its right mind finds the
>next available article by a straight linear search.  Directory reading is

Actually, many readers do exactly that.  By and large, many sites refuse
to accept long expiry dates on most groups (Thanks to the help fo C news
in part) so this is not that big a loss, particularly with caches.

I'll tell you why I don't do it.  Because opendir isn't fully standard yet,
and every variant feature you use is another porting headache.  This may
be an irrational fear -- opendir or a standard 16 byte record directory
format can be found almost everywhere nowadays.  But one just grows to
fear such moves, when a loop of opens is sure to work and generally isn't
far off, either.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473