
Computer Science
number information will fit, by methods that we can look at later. The
awkward items are strings like names and addresses. These will be chopped
if they are too long and padded out with blanks if they are too short, and a
random-access filing program will carry out this work automatically.
Numbers are treated in a rather special way. Since each item that is stored
in a random-access file must be a string, the obvious thing to do is to convert
each number into a string. This could be done by converting each digit of a
number into ASCII code, and recording these ASCII codes as a string, but
this is a slow action, and for larg ...