Programming
- Thread starter scottyy
- Start date
raphanator
Member
What format do "departments" and "member lists" come in? It all depends on what you already have, but you're probably going to have two nested "while" loops - one for listing departments, another for listing members.
That's not exactly what I asked.
Are the names stored directly in files? Will you add new departments once the code is complete? Do you have any other data, such as the number of employees? Is the data already present?
I advise you to use "while" loops. But if you don't have a design, there's not much valuable info that I can give you.
The problem with FOR loops is that they make employees harder to add. He'd need to keep a counter and update it. If he wants to "count all the members", he wouldn't have a counter.
WHILE loops are more robust. If he's using the format I was thinking of, he could keep reading lines until the document was finished. If he wanted to add new employees, he'd only need to append lines.
Removing employees is a bit trickier, but should work with a combination of REWRITE (on a temporary), RESET (on the current file) and finally replace the old file (remove) with the new one (rename). This is one of the better approaches for serious programs, if he's doing it for an actual business. Since the modification is atomic, if the program crashes before the rename, it would know the next time it runs, maintaining file consistency. He could go a little further, but it all depends on the requirements.
Ending all files with an "----END-FILE----" marker will enable you to check whether the file was written properly. Then a few changes are in order.
I've never used anything other than text files to store data with Pascal. Maybe there are libraries for databases which are more efficient.
If you are having many employees, consider indexing them.
like "department-management--employees-A.txt"
.txt is optional of course.
only if your version of Pascal supports longer filenames. the one I used was 16-bit and had some pretty shitty restrictions.
WHILE loops are more robust. If he's using the format I was thinking of, he could keep reading lines until the document was finished. If he wanted to add new employees, he'd only need to append lines.
Removing employees is a bit trickier, but should work with a combination of REWRITE (on a temporary), RESET (on the current file) and finally replace the old file (remove) with the new one (rename). This is one of the better approaches for serious programs, if he's doing it for an actual business. Since the modification is atomic, if the program crashes before the rename, it would know the next time it runs, maintaining file consistency. He could go a little further, but it all depends on the requirements.
Ending all files with an "----END-FILE----" marker will enable you to check whether the file was written properly. Then a few changes are in order.
I've never used anything other than text files to store data with Pascal. Maybe there are libraries for databases which are more efficient.
If you are having many employees, consider indexing them.
like "department-management--employees-A.txt"
.txt is optional of course.
only if your version of Pascal supports longer filenames. the one I used was 16-bit and had some pretty shitty restrictions.
Last edited:
