ac@utgpu.UUCP (11/16/87)
Some time ago there was much traffic about various problems with using the SELECT service. Some problems went away when UPDATE mode was used instead of WRITE when opening device windows. At that time I too had numerous problems using that service but not all of them got solver by the switch to UPDATE. Unfortunately, at the time I had only 128K so I was sure that memory shortage was a culprit in my case. Now I have 512k I was surprised to find some problems still exist. In particular, I typed in a SELECT example from the BASIC09 manual -- the one that draws a large number of ellipses on the screen and then returns to the original screen. I altered the open to use UPDATE instead of WRITE. Now when I run this program from a window it works fine but if I run it from a VDG screen the ellipses are drawn but when it's time to go back to the original screen (/term in this case) the screen clears and the system hangs. In another case I had a second window (the default /W7) with a shell in it. This time when I started the program from /term it opened the temporary device window, drew the ellipses, and then instead of returning to the /term window it "returned" the /w7. Perhaps SELECT just doesn't work right for VDG screens. I have noticed other oddities, again always with /term. Sometime DEINIZ takes several attempts with /term. Sometimes inizing a VDG screen crashes my system. It surprises me that other people haven't complained of similar failures but on the other hand by the time most people seem to get around to playing with SELECT, they have already long ago done away with VDG screens (except running one accasionally to run something like T/S EDIT). If anyone can shed any light on all this I would be forever grateful. -- Name: Mark Acfield (University of Toronto Computing Services) Path: ihnp4!utgpu!ac Alias: ac@utoronto.bitnet