Saving and Restoring Multiple Objects

I/O operations performed on a basic ChannelChannel are sequential. This means that if you write more than one ObjectObject to a Channel, each new Object's textual description is simply appended to the previous one. You can store any number of Objects in this way, subject only to the storage space you have available.

After you read an Object back from a basic Channel, the Channel is “positioned” at the end of that Object's textual description. If you then perform another read, you will read the next Object's textual description and therefore retrieve the next Object. This process may be repeated to read each Object in turn. When there are no more Objects to be read, astReadastRead will return the value AST__NULL to indicate an end-of-file.