Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!nih-csl!lhc!mimsy!haven!udel!wuarchive!usc!apple!olivea!mintaka!dcw
From: dcw@lcs.mit.edu (David C. Whitney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: two questions...
Message-ID: <1990Nov6.144524.28199@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 6 Nov 90 14:45:24 GMT
References: <104@generic.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu (Lucifer Maleficius)
Organization: MIT Spoken Language Systems Group
Lines: 22

In article <104@generic.UUCP> taob@pnet91.cts.com (Brian Tao) writes:
>> It probably has to due
>> at least partially with the fact that Apple Pascal makes you keep your
>> files sequentially on disk
>
>    You mean to say that Apple Pascal keeps all your files CONTIGUOUS (all in
>one continuous block, not scattered all over the place).  Is that feature
>automatic?  Or do you have to specify Krunch Disk to optimize the files?

Apple Pascal actually won't write your file to disk if there isn't a
large enough contiguous block of free space. K)runching just presses
the (already) contiguous files into one large used space, thereby
making all the freespace contiguous. The directory entry for each file
indicated which block the file starts at and how many blocks long it
is. This pretty much eliminates the need for index blocks. Has it's
plusses and minuses (can you say, "Krunch It!" every ten minutes?).

--
Dave Whitney
Computer Science MIT 1990	| I wrote Z-Link and BinSCII. Send me bug
dcw@lcs.mit.edu			| reports. I need a job. Send me an offer.
Every now and then one makes a mistake. Mine was probably this post.