kim@analog.UUCP (Kim Helliwell ) (01/04/85)
I'm not implying that there is only ONE bug in MacPascal, or anything, but
this one is a killer (to me, at any rate)
I am running Pascal on a 512K Mac and trying to develop a fairly large
program, with a view to making a stand-alone application of it when the
appropriate tools become available and I can afford them. One reviewer
of MacPascal led me to believe that a 512K Mac would allow 10000 line
programs to run under Pascal.
This appears not to be true. I don't have an exact count of the lines, but
the source file for my program is just under 24K, and it is probably no larger
than 1500 lines. This is what started happening: I added one or two lines and
tried to test things, and got an error message to the effect that I was passing
too few parameters to a procedure or function. The little hand pointed to the
program header ("Program blotblotblot"). Delete the lines I had added, and
then things ran fine. I fiddled around a while, and finally deleted a bunch
of code that was no longer needed, and THEN I could add the one or two lines
I was trying to add in the first place! All the tests I could bring to bear
pointed to a hypothesis that there is an internal invisible limit on code
size in MacPascal, which is far lower than the size of memory would lead
one to believe. My listing takes 16% of the available memory, and the crash
happens before many data structures get initialized, so it is not that I
have an inordinate amount of data. BTW, I do have both Quickdraw libraries
and the SANE library included-I think these together take about 6% of the
available memory.
Is there anyone else who has experienced this? The documentation very
carefully omits any reference to a place to call for help or to report
bugs, and there is no promise of bug fixes or updates, and no registration
that I could see. So, does anyone know to whom I may report this
problem? Would Apple be able to help?
{hplabs,menlo70}!analog!kim