apple II and text files

[<F0O@psuvm.psu.edu>]

   I was trying to write a program today which would read in a line of
text and then append it to another file.  What I found out seems to be
that you can't both read and write at the same time, as if there is
only one buffer in the apple which is used for both input and output.
If this is true, this is bizarre!  Am I doing something wrong, or do
you have to read then close, write and close, then repeat the cycle?
   Also, how reliable is the append function?  I appended some data to
what was supposed to be a blank file, but after appending there was
some junk at the beginning.  Are there any gotchs to writing and reading
text files?

                                                           [Tim]