pjm@sdics.UUCP (Phil Mercurio) (11/03/86)
<> (The following was mailed to me rather than posted--I'm reposting it) (upon request of the author. ---Phil Mercurio) Yes -- I received my copy of Gamma 1 a few days ago as well. I'm not as happy as I expected to be, though. For a start, that offer of a $20 credit for bug reports received by the 17th...? When the package arrives on the 21st that's a little hard. I hope to have time mighty soon to get a letter off to CBM detailing the problems I've encountered, but I might as well flame a little here, too. I've actually been trying to use NotePad for some quickie tasks (like documenting my slide collection) and was having some problems with Beta 4. The Gamma version doesn't seem any better. In particular, if you go to the bottom of a page and delete, the invisible form-feed separator gets eaten, and you are screwed up for ever more. (I tried to get in with EMACS and fix things, but unfortunately NotePad terminates font control stuff with a null, causing EMACS to lose things too...) When I really started screaming, though, was after I had built a completely new compiler disk, with all the header files from the Include.strip disk. I would judge that about SEVENTY PERCENT of these files are bad! Apparently the version of the stripper that was used is in the habit of also chopping out the first code line after a comment, leaving headless structure definitions, endifs without ifs, and so on. It's pathetic, really, because all it would have taken to catch this before sending out all those disks would have been to actually try a compile... or even simply run a set of #includes through -- most of the errors don't need any code to show up. I spent the better part of three days comparing bad files with their originals and re-editing. (Naturally I didn't trust trying to strip the originals, though I'm now informed that at least some versions of the program work flawlessly.) Not to be entirely negative, I also like the idea of packaging the docs in InfoMinder (and I'm also VERY glad of the alternative ARC format, because I need hardcopy sometimes). I haven't done any real comparisons, but the new Alink seems quite a bit faster; I'm using it again instead of Blink at the moment because of one or two little glitches I ran across in version 5.7 of that (like not properly recognising multiple externs). I understand these are fixed in the lates version available on Fish though. Pete Goodeve -- Berkeley