orcus@pro-lep.cts.com (Brian Greenstone) (01/23/89)
In response to the letter about using TML pascal with GS/OS and a crash occuring, you might want to know that there is a apparently a bug in GS/OS's loader that occasionally writes "mystery" bytes into programs. I found the bug in an assembly program that Im writing and after many days of testing found that for some reason, GS/OS writes a few random bytes into the same place in memory. Also, GS/OS has a screwed up file size indicator. If you go into Paintworks Gold or anyother program and create a file (picture) which is mostly $00's (black screen) and you save it unpacked, the file size will be much much smaller than the 32K that it should be, and thus PaintWorks will not read the picture back in. Also, if you take any other previously created picture which is mostly $00's and you try to copy it with any GS/OS application (ie the Finder), the new copy will be the wrong file size. Understand that GS/OS is not packing the file at all, it is simply writing the wrong block usage number into the directory listing. This does leave room for serious system problems, however.