TEREBESS%UVVM.BITNET@CORNELLC.CCS.CORNELL.EDU (Paul Romaniuk) (05/26/88)
Can anyone suggest a solution to this problem? I'm writing a stack that's designed to analyze sequences of nucleic acids. These are long strings (e.g. 100-10,000 characters long) without spaces or carriage returns. Given their size, they go into scrolling fields quite easily, and one of the functions that I want to put into the stack is the ability to enter nucleic acid sequences, and edit old sequences. I didn't anticipate any problems, but found that trying to insert characters anywhere within a >1500 long string ties up my Mac Plus forever (no response after several minutes), and does even stranger things on my Mac II. On the Mac II, the newly typed characters appear in a spot entirely different from the insertion point. However, this is a display problem -- scrolling the field "resets" the display, and shows that the new characters were in fact placed in the correct spot. Selecting and deleting characters on the Mac II also has some unexpected difficulties. Sometimes everything, including characters past the insertion point disappear but again, reappear after scrolling. At other times, all but three or four of the intended characters are deleted, but the remaining ones stay highlighted. Once again, scrolling the field "resets" the display, showing that the operation has actually been correctly performed. This bug appears in both HyperCard 1.1 and 1.2 -- is Apple aware of it? Is there a fix available/ in the works. Anybody have a suggestion in the meantime?