jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA.UUCP (04/28/87)
I have just started writing in ACTION!, so pardon the dumb questions, but can anyone tell me if there is a way to read a block of bytes from a device in ACTION! without taking them one at a time? Specifically, GetD(channel) returns one byte, InputBD(channel) also returns one byte, and (I assume) InputMD(channel, buffer, maxchars) inputs groups of characters all right, but terminates input on an EOL character. Or does it? What I want to do is to read in a specified number of characters, except if End Of File occurs during the attempt, I want to know how many characters were actually read before that happened. This can be done easily in assembly language -- it is precisely what CIO will do -- but I wonder if there is a way to do it in ACTION, other than doing a CIO call in a "code block" or subroutine call. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, -John Sangster / jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa