thanks everyone for your help! i should have mentioned that i did play with std.stdio.File.readf and rawRead but was too thick to figure out a working solution.
o i could not figure out how to make readf work with my self defined struct o same with rawRead. but here i understand my mistake now: i have to pass an array of my struct, even if i only want to read it once. endianness and padding are certainly issues. i have spent some time figuring out how to adjust struct packing in D. my definitions are now full of align(2) declarations... as for the endianness, as i can oversee it now all potential users will sit on little-endian machines. the group of users is small, just our workgroup. the datafiles in question are produced by some 3rd party 16bit windows software, so i have to accept the way the data is stored in the file. also, they can be as big as 2GB so reading in the whole file is not an option. thanks again, det
