From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Jan 23 12:36:59 2004
Subject: Re: file offsets used by fseek and ftell
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Alois Schloegl <alois dot schloegl at tugraz dot at>
Cc: octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu, bug-octave@bevo.che.wisc.edu
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 12:36:11 -0600

On 23-Jan-2004, Alois Schloegl <alois dot schloegl at tugraz dot at> wrote:

| The natural representation of the position of a file pointer is a 
| numeric value.

I would think it would be a marker of some sort, but a number does not
necessarily work.  What does it mean?  Is it the number of bytes or
characters (what are they, and what if a file is a mixture of
different character widths) etc.  Also, as I understand it, the
"number of bytes" from the beginning of the file may not be meaningful
because of things like end-of-line translation, etc.  I think that
these are other reasons for making streampos something that you can't
look at as an integer.

jwe