Here, here. Chris also stated this. ANSI standard M is not really designed to handle binary data. This is one reason Intersystems added extensions (if you wish to call it that). But then you are bound to a specific M vendor's implementation, in this case, Cache.
If you are going to stay strictly within ANSI standard M, then binary data is best handled outside of the M environment. This is not really a VA Kernel issue since the Kernel is adhering to ANSI M for its globals. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Maury Pepper" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2005 12:52 PM Subject: Re: [Hardhats-members] more M read questions Kevin, You are on the right track. Increasing the number of characters per READ is by far the most significant thing you can do to speed up your routine. Reading one character at a time using a star-Read is very slow. Each M implementation has a way to do binary reads -- ie, a read which does not look for a terminator and does not translate any characters (like HT into spaces), but the M Standard does not specify this level of detail -- it's left to the implementer. I don't know whether VistA provides a way to call a file Open that provides the necessary parameters for this. Others on this list will. Most M's do not have a problem storing binary data strings in globals. (I know of only one that uses null-terminated strings, and to my knowledge, it has never been used for VistA.) WHY do this at all? It seems like the long-way around. Normally, when a file is the object of interest, one just points to it by name and lets the underlaying OS and utilities handle it. ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
