Art of Assembly Language, 1st Edition

8.3. 8.3 Sequential Files

Sequential files are perfect for three types of persistent data: ASCII text files, "memory dumps," and stream data. Because you're probably familiar with ASCII text files, we'll skip their discussion. The other two methods of writing sequential files deserve more explanation.

A "memory dump" is a file that consists of data you transfer from data structures in memory directly to a file. Although the term "memory dump" suggests that you sequentially transfer data from consecutive memory locations to the file, this isn't necessarily the case. Memory access can, an often does, occur in a random access fashion. However, once the application constructs a record to write to the file, it writes that record in a sequential fashion ...