os9@nyit.UUCP (OS9 News) (02/20/86)
I was relieved to see the reposted digests today.
[moderator's note: me too! -bp]
First, let me corroborate J. Jones' bug in BASIC09
re EXITIF blocks -- I found long ago they don't work
inside normal IF - ELSE blocks, and I hope I posted it.
Lucky they left GOTO in the language! Too bad you can't
use symbolic labels, just those ancient numeric ones.
Some problems with XCOM9, from this weekend when I used
it with WordPak-II and PBJ's OS9 driver for it.
(I got xcom9 from the national OS9 User's Group).
(1) When downloading, a few chars get dropped whenever
xcom9 holds the Host and writes to the disk.
(2) You can't exit xcom9 at all under WordPak!
BREAK is totally ignored! You can escape ($) to shell
and kill yourself, but afterwards your screen printing
runs about 6 lines behind. Or OS9 hangs up totally.
I don't recall these problems when not using WordPak.
I got around problem (1) by running xcom9 with more memory
so the download files could each fit in the buffer
(no disk writing till finished).
Since xcom9 must send the ^S (XOFF) to the host when the buffer
is "almost full", I should edit the source and increase
the value of "almost". Anyone know what that constant
is called? Is that the problem? (I was using 1200 Baud).
Problem (2) may be due to xcom9's insistence on closing
down all its peripherals before exiting (a noble intent).
It may be unable to close the paths to WORDPAK, so it
just stays up (and running well, BTW).
Why should Worpak's paths be harder to close?
Of course, suicide via shell doesn't close anything right
(can't OS9 find a proc's paths and close them??),
so no wonder both TERM and /T2 are hosed up afterwards.
If I try to run xcom9 again, I get the UNDOCUMENTED
error message #213 and the "usage" line.
I blame this on /T2's still appearing to be in use.
Finally, can you generate a RUBOUT (0ctal 177, hex 7F)
character on the Coco keyboard? With WordPak?
It's embarrassing to be unable to "break" a running
UN*X host process!
However, I did discover that CTRL-BACKSLASH can be
sent by holding both SHIFT and CLEAR and hitting the
up-arrow/square-bracket key. This kills the host process
but also dumps core, and is also the escape char to
my company's LAN. (It may not work without WordPak.)
--
---
516-686-7644 (Bruce Perens or Alex Arthur)
{allegra,seismo,decvax,vax135,ihnp4,mcvax}!philabs!nyit!os9
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