#1151 empty write access at pos 1 vs. N greater than 1

[frank]

After writing an empty string in a new file at position 1 the file exists with size 0.
After writing one character into a new file at position N the file exists with size N.
After writing an empty string in a new file at position N the file exists witj size 0.

I'd expect a minimal size N-1 after any successful write access at position N, also for an empty charout( FILE, '' ), at the moment only position 1 works as expected yielding size 0.

[Erich]

I'd expect a minimal size N-1 after any successful write access

According to 7.4.15. CHAROUT, "the string can be a null string, in which case no characters are written to the stream, and 0 is always returned."

As nothing is written to the file, your result should be the expected behavior

[Rick McGuire]

There is no such thing as writing an empty string. If there is no data to write, then nothing is written. the 0-length file is not created by the act of writing the null string, but by opening the file itself.

[frank]

This issue had a "high astonishment factor" for me in experiments with "sparse" FAT disk images created in a REXX script. Writing lots of NUL bytes is slow; just changing the position beyond the current EOF is fast. Apparently the trick is to seek to POS-1 and write one NUL instead of going to POS and write zero bytes.