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From: russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: Apple File Exchange (apology to Matt)
Message-ID: <1990Sep7.152829.15533@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 7 Sep 90 15:28:29 GMT
References: <1990Aug31.062233.10716@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <1990Aug31.205240.16853@laguna.ccsf.caltech.edu> <20804@fs2.NISC.SRI.COM>
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In article <20804@fs2.NISC.SRI.COM> cwilson@NISC.SRI.COM (Chad Wilson) writes:
>
>a2fx achieves the speed it does because it's doing straight block 
>reads off of the disk.  Once it's found where the file is, away it
>goes, only stopping to write out the buffer when it gets full.  
>Pretty simple, so it's pretty fast.   The thing that really 
>astounded me was the speed at which it reads the directory... considering
>all the code I wrote, it's still bloody fast... unless the catalog
>happens to be scattered all over the disk, like one that someone sent
>me. 
>
>I don't know if there's such a thing as READ_BLOCK in the MacOS world.  
>It'll be real interesting to see what the speed difference is when
>I get around to writing a GS version of a2fx, which will use the fst
>calls...

Yes, there is a READ_BLOCK in the MacOS world.  And Apple File Exchange MUST
use it, as otherwise, there is no way to get the data from this disk (the
file system won't handle it, remember?).

>Speaking of a GS version, what's the interest level on something
>more akin to AFE (Mac), where you can have different translators and
>such?    Considering that I haven't even written a single line of
>GS-specific code, it'll take a day or two, but is the interest there?

Yuck-- AFE on the mac side is a kludge.  IMO, Apple should have external
file systems (equivalent of FSTs), so ANY program can read Prodos and MS-DOS
disks (Dayna does this for MS-DOS, no one does it for prodos). Something
like AFE should do file format translations only, NOT disk format translations.