jeffc@osf.ORG (Jeff Carter) (03/06/90)
I recently began porting (a reasonably simple task) Icon to a DECstation 3100 (MIPS RISC chipset, runs Ultrix. aka PMAX). I have run in to a couple of things that hopefully someone else out there has a solution for, or suggestions how to debug: (1) There are numurous calls to fopen() with "rb" and "wb" modes that are _not_ surrounded by OS-specific #ifdef's. This leads me to believe (unfortunately) that maybe the particular version I have hasn't been run on a wide variety of UNIX machines. Any comments? Are other versions of UNIX more forgiving than ULTRIX 3.0? (2) Floating-point conversions. I get numerous failures of the "eval" and "fncs" tests that seem to stem from a problem with the conversion of real numbers to their string representations. For example, from the "eval" test: 3c3 < 2.0 === +2.0 ----> 9.018482111602407e-O4 --- > 2.0 === +2.0 ----> 2.0 And from the "fncs" test: 3c3 < copy(1.0) ----> 9.017964046223754e-O4 --- > copy(1.0) ----> 1.0 There are numerous other examples, but almost all of the reported errors are similar to these. (3) Memory allocation. Early the startup, the executable calls fopen() in order to get the code file. This, unfortunately, causes fopen() to call malloc(), which immediately fails because initalloc() hasn't been called. And initalloc doesn't get called until after the header is read from the code file. This forces me to use the static allocation versions of the memory management routines. The first application that I want to use this for wants to use a _lot_ of string space. I keep getting "out of space in string region" errors, and having to restart with larger and larger values. This is a royal pain. Has anyone looked at making the code region be allocated out of the static memory region, or some other technique that would let me initialize the memory allocation routine earlier? Is there a particular reason why this _won't_ work (so I don't waste my time on it, only to dicover the fatal flaw.) jeff carter jeffc@osf.org
ralph@CS.ARIZONA.EDU (Ralph Griswold) (03/06/90)
Version 8 of Icon, to be out shortly, will support the DECstation and several other newer workstations, including the Sun SPARCstation and the NeXT machine. (All of the problems noted in earlier mail are corrected in Version 8.) Ralph Griswold / Dept of Computer Science / Univ of Arizona / Tucson, AZ 85721 +1 602 621 6609 ralph@cs.arizona.edu uunet!arizona!ralph