On Friday 22 June 2007 16:52, Kurt W Hirchert wrote:
> The entire length of the record could be determined by
> traversing the sequence of partial records that comprised it, but the
> length was not stored in one place.
Exactly---was this not included in the standard functionality because it may
be inefficient? It seems like a useful and natural thing to allow especially
if a lot of implementations do indeed directly store the length.
BTW, can one really (legally) read a shorter string than what was written with
unformatted IO (as Bill suggested)?
Thanks,
Aleks
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