🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec19.012355.26665@ll.mit.edu> ejon@ll.mit.edu (Eric Jones) writes:


>But isn't that exactly his point?  Sure you can write an ISAM file 
>structure using fseek (and if you're REALLY smart, you might even
>write an efficient one), but then how's anyone else going to use
>your files?

By RTFM of course!!

Consider the converse: 

You write a file using the oddball formats of VMS.

You send it to someone else.

He can't read it because it's oddball.

How does he read it??
The only way is to RTFM and here the FM refers to the 1600 pounds
of VMS stuff or Disk 47 of the 677 volume CD manuals.

The Unix way has proven to be the best way; its one of the biggest
reasons VMS is a current sales disaster.

The doc for your own ISAM is maybe 2 pages long.

Also consider this: if you write that file on VMS using the VMS
proprietary method, you can't read it on any other machine using
the same code. If you did it the C/Unix way, you code will run as-is
on any machine using standard C. Even VMS. 

Doug McDonald