nowlin@iwtqg.att.com (11/10/90)
Here's a message I'm passing along for a friend. He's having a problem
with Icon on MS-DOS and it doesn't have anything to do with memory this
time! Any help would be appreciated.
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I think I've tripped on an honest to goodness bug in MS-DOS Icon for
Version 8. I've been wrong on things like this before but here's what I
found last night.
I am reading in a PC-FILE database and processing it with V8 of Icon on an
AT&T 6300+ MS-DOS compatible computer. The file is not too long - about
5000 bytes. I start by reading in a number of fixed length (32 byte)
header records until I get to a record that starts with a newline
character.
Normally it would read 20-30 such 32-byte records. But with V8 it read the
first and then the next:
line := reads(fd,32)
returns not 32 characters but just 16 and a subsequent read attempt fails.
I presume with EOF.
A dump of the database file shows that the 49th character is an octal 032
which is the DOS CONTROL-Z or end-of-file marker. What appears to be
happening is that V8 is stopping when it sees that CTL-Z. V7 did not do
this!
The open was like:
fd := open("TESTOFF.DBF","ru") | stop("DBF open failed")
and the open succeeds.
Joe T. Hall
(att!ihlpf!pax)