ACTION! assistance...

ACTION! assistance...

Post by j.. » Mon, 02 Apr 1990 23:08:00



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,