Working With Pascal Files

A reader wrote this month with a problem that is certainly not unique to programmers who are trying to learn Pascal. His problem was how to do I/O. While I went over his sample code, I found a number of other basic errors, again of a type that are not uncommon to novices to this language. Following is his listing, a general commentary on the errors and how to avoid them, and a sample program which performs simple I/O.