Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > Pascal I/O worked with a "one element preread", where what we'd > consider a read operation was performed by the open operation -- which > made console I/O a royal pain
Yep. Later implementations reduced the pain somewhat by using a "lazy" scheme which deferred the read until you tried to do something with the buffer. But they couldn't completely hide the fact that testing for eof requires a lookahead. > Original Pascal uses > > f = open(somefile) > do something with f^ > read(f) Actually, I think it was get(f) to read the next record into the buffer. Read(f, x) was a higher-level procedure equivalent to something like x = f^; get(f) Plus for text files read() and write() did various other fancy things. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
