Searchlight Programmer's Library

                  (c) Copyright 1993 Searchlight Software


Searchlight Programmer's Library is a series of Turbo Pascal unit
(TPU) files which can be linked into Turbo Pascal programs, providing
a wide range of functions for manipulating Searchlight data files.
Included are procedures to access, add and delete users, members,
messages and files from SLBBS data structures.

Units in this library provide low and midlevel file i/o operations
exclusively. No user input/output oriented procedures are provided.

It is not the intention of this documentation to describe the
Searchlight data structures at their lowest level. In particular,
the details of binary tree management, free record management,
and subboard message indexing are not covered. Instead, the library
functions provided by the various TPU files automatically implement
these data structures and spare the applications programmer from
having to re-invent the low level code for doing so. We do explain
the workings of mid to high level data structures necessary for
writing complex programs that access the Searchlight database.

This file provides general principles and recommendations for using
the TPU library for various types of applications.
For more information, consult:

SLTPU.REF    - Complete reference to provided procedures and functions.
FILEDEF.REF  - Record layouts provided by the FILEDEF.TPU unit.
BLOCK.REF    - Record layouts provided in the BLOCK.TPU unit.
STYLEDEF.REF - Record layouts for the STYLEDEF.TPU unit.
SAMPLE?.PAS  - Example programs.