Re: file offsets used by fseek and ftell

[John W. Eaton]

On 23-Jan-2004, Alois Schloegl <address@hidden> wrote:

| The natural representation of the position of a file pointer is a 
| numeric value.

I would think it would be a marker of some sort, but a number does not
necessarily work.  What does it mean?  Is it the number of bytes or
characters (what are they, and what if a file is a mixture of
different character widths) etc.  Also, as I understand it, the
"number of bytes" from the beginning of the file may not be meaningful
because of things like end-of-line translation, etc.  I think that
these are other reasons for making streampos something that you can't
look at as an integer.

jwe