[comp.sys.mac.programmer] THINK Pascal Editor Unstable

slang@bnr.ca (Steven Langlois) (06/14/91)

Has anyone noticed that the THINK Pascal editor is a little unstable.
I have been putting up with it for about 2 years now but yesterday was
the first day it was really painful and I lost work. I find that
when a file gets around 1000 lines that the unstableness begins. The 
window becomes corrupted. Under System 6.0.x I would just quit and save
and usually things were fine, i.e. my changes were saved properly.
It seems that the appearance of the text in the window was corrupted but
the file's contents were fine. I found that I had to quit the application
to fix things, closing and reopening the file didn't work very well. The appearance of the file in the window would quickly become currupted again. 

Under System 7.0, saving the file in this situation is not the best thing
to do. If you try to save the file, the Mac will mostly likely come
to a grinding halt and you should see what it does to the file you 
tried to save after you reboot the Mac. It's like someone reached in at 
random points and takes out a view lines every now and then, and the
end of the file, gone! Some other stuff is duplicated, etc. It took 
me 2 hours to put my file back together again. Fortuneatly, I make
frequent backups, at least to floppy once a day so the damage was limited.

The moral of the story... under System 7.0 with THINK Pascal 3.0.2, save
frequently to disk and don't attempt to save the file when the appearance
of the file in the window become corrupted.

The corruption of the appearance of files occurs with the same frequency
under System 6 and System 7 but the results of attempting to save 
a corrupted file in much more serious under System 7.

I usually don't like to complain about such things, but as I mentioned
previously, yesterday was the first day in 2 years that I have lost
a significant amount of work do to this problem. I really like 
THINK Pascal and, am a great supported of Symantec's products, and I will
continue to use THINK Pascal 3.0.2, I just wish that their editor for THINK Pascal was a little more stable. Maybe their next version which will be
System 7 compatible will have a more stable editor (oh please, oh please).

I have a Mac IIfx with 8 Mey and am running System 7 without 32 bit mode
or VM. The same problem occurred on II ci, and SE/30 in the past.

Steven Langlois
ISDN Basic Rate Access
BNR, a subsidiary of Northern Telecom

Internet: slang@bnr.ca
 

wolf@alesi.cipl.uiowa.edu (Michael J. Wolf) (06/14/91)

I have also had some problems with the Editor (under 6.0.x SE with 2.5M)

A few times I would be scrolling by chunks and it would come up with white space
and parts of lines moved over and off the left side of the screen.

Sometimes scrolling back up then down (or vice versa) would help, or closing and
reopening the file.

I have had to restart TP to correct it a couple times.

I am using 3.0.2.  I have had no loss of data as it has saved correctly (usually I 
did not do any attempted editing once the anomilies appeared during a session.

So, Symantec:  Are you working on this?

Michael