>
> I have two rules about writing Pascal programs:
>
>    1) don't use Pascal I/O.
>
> and, rule #2, which is very important if you broke rule #1:
>
>    2) *NEVER* use Pascal I/O!
>
> Pascal I/O is terribly slow, and has a variety of problems ... I've seen
> orders (yes, 100 times!) of magnitude improvment in some programs when
> we dumped the Pascal I/O and replaced it with intrinsic I/O.
>
Hi Stan:

You are lucky, that you can use low-level I/O instead of Pascal.
Might be that the HP programmers are lucky, having intrinsics accessible
from any language.
I think, however, that low-level I/O makes a program machine-dependent and
unportable. I prefer using PASCAL I/O to retain the programs more
readable.
I had problem with Pascal I/O only once, when I tried to read variable
records of a spoolfile, and garbage remained at the end of the records
from the previous one, if a short record followed a long one.

                                Cheers
                                              Frank

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