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000028_icon-group-sender _Fri Jan 27 15:12:45 1995.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Fri, 27 Jan 1995 13:12:56 MST
From: Nick Williams <nmw@ios.com>
Message-Id: <199501272012.PAA03285@ios.com>
Subject: Re: Icon V9, under OpenVMS/VAX and Indexed RMS files (fwd)
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 15:12:45 -0500 (EST)
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>btiffin@on.bell.ca (Brian Tiffin) writes:
>>I'd like a way of indexing into our keyed Canada Post data
>>to pull out the actual postal code. [...] Reading through the file as flat
>>ASCII just doesn't cut it and its way too huge to pull into a TABLE.
>>I'm thinking that I should probably look into the C interface [...]
>You probably already have fast query programs for your postal database,
>including ones that let you make queries from the shell prompt.
>If I were doing this under MS-DOS, I'd use system() to call such a
>query program, rather than coding my own function. I'd have it write
>the query result to a RAMDisk, & I'd have the executable code of the
>query program on a RAM-cached disk. The only real overhead would be
>process switching, which would be much faster than any Icon
>implementation of a database query, & much easier to program.
>The "C interface", allowing you to code C routines to integrate
>with your Icon routines, hasn't worked for several years, AFAIK.
>It's possible to hack the interpreter to put in your own functions,
>but that's much more difficult than using system().
Not true. The C interface works perfectly, at least on the Unix systems
I've tested it on. Even it it doesn't work you can always extend the set
of functions supported by Icon by writing some RTL code and rebuilding
the interpreter or rt.a and rt.db.
>Always call collect() right before each system() call.
Nick
IOS System Operator (nmw@ios.com)