prm@aplcen.UUCP (Paul McMullin APL x7823) (09/09/85)
I have a DeSmet C compiler for my 512k mac, and am fairly pleased with it. With the ram disk installed at about 300kb, the compilations are fairly fast (a few seconds for a short program), and it seems to have tons of hooks into the ROM code (more than I need...) So much for the good news... (1) The "pr" program (distributed without sources darnit!) screws up after printing about a page and a half of a program's code. Hey! No problem I thought... I'll just write my own program to print listings on the imagewriter... but wait, how to get the printer to do anything? (2) The only reference to using the imagewriter that I can find in the 300 page manual is "the pr program assumes that the printer is on serial port B"... no explaination on using serial port B, no help, nothing,... There is some reference to ports in the distributed "include" file "osutil.h", but alas, no help or documentation of the use or purpose of the include file... but wait, even if I could get any response out of the printer (why isn't it just a file called "lp:" or some such cute trick anyway?): (3) I can't seem to get a file opened to read the program text and dump it out to the screen... I'm sure I'll eventually get it by tweaking on the code of the "dump" program (whose source WAS distributed, and which DOES dump the program text from a file) (4) Ignoring all of this, I wrote a first hack at the application I have in mind, and it is pretty smooth... the I/O to the keyboard and the screen work fairly simply... but I intend for the program to use the numeric keyboard for entering a fair amount of data, and I have discovered that the "enter" key produces some funny control character (not '\n' or '\r') (which I'll get and handle o.k., but I would have liked to have had a manual page on quirks and conventions of the mac)... and if the "enter" key is held down, the program is exited and the finder re-entered. This latter feature is untolerable! How can I disable it? Holding any other key down fails to produce this effect... if the user of my application gets tired and rests on the enter key of the numeric keypad, its o.k. to produce lots of chars, but hopeless to have this cause the exit... I guess that a fair amount of this stuff would be explained if I had a copy of "inside the Mac"... but I don't. Anyone want to help? Thanks in advance. -prm (paul@maryland will also work...)