[progress Communities] [progress Openedge Abl] Forum Post: Re: 11.5: Read And Write A File 1:1

[Thomas Mercer-Hursh]

Please beware with the easy coding that longchars seem to bring to the table. Large longchars need to be treated with care! Counting the number of lines in a longchar for every iteration of a loop is not something you really want to do. Putting in in a large category of things where something doesn't change in a loop and one doesn't want to re-evaluate it on every iteration of the loop. Not unique to longchars. Likewise, one wouldn't want to use a loop to count lines because num-entries does this for you ... again, one of a long list of don't do things the hard way when an easy way exists. Which said, if one restates the problem such that one needs a loop and there is no simple function to get the answer, one might very well *want* to do the thing, even if it weren't terribly fast, simply because that is the problem to be solved.

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