Reading a file and storing the data into a record (VHDL)

I'm sorry to say this but there are many problems with the code... Looks like you need a different approach as you don't seem to understand the fundamental concepts of digital electronics, especially of combinational and sequential logic. How about starting from the beginning of the book, the really 'simple' stuff? Or an on-line tutorial such as this one:

http://www.doulos.com/knowhow/vhdl_designers_guide/an_example_design_entity/

followed by

http://www.doulos.com/knowhow/vhdl_designers_guide/tips/sequential_processes/

Once you understand the core basics, perhaps it might be worth looking at a more complex example such as this led blinker:

http://www.armadeus.com/wiki/index.php?title=simple_blinking_led

With knowledge from the first link, you could design a test bench for it, see how it works. I'm just saying this because writing a test-bench to read a file with no background knowledge will take a very long time and will be frustrating!

But here just a few tips:

- in your case, functions and signals should be defined in the architecture header.

- variables should be defined in the process header for processes and in the function header for functions.