hsu_wh@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (William H Hsu) (05/12/91)
I have written a SuperCard stack which contains about 7 windows and is very densely filled with digitized color and grayscale graphics and ASCII text. In one of the windows (actually in a card background) I wrote a multi- window search routine which uses "Find" as its basic command (inside a loop). The arguments to the "Find" are: - a string to be searched for - a window to open (originally a stack before proting to SC v 1.5) - the field to be searched for, usually something like: bg fld "Report Window" of wd theWindow I am getting a crash during searches for certain words (e.g., "striate cortex") which causes the Mac (I've tried this on a 2.5 Mb SE, a 5 Mb IIcx, and an 8 Mb IIcx) to freeze up completely. Other words (e.g., "positron") work fine. Different words seem to crash on different windows; however, the only two cases in which I have been able to recreate the bomb occurred when the window (i.e., the field) was blank -- all cards were devoid of text. Putting in some didn't help. If anyone can tell what is wrong at this point, I would greatly appreciate it. I would certainly be willing to mail any or all of the code to whomever might care to take a look, but it is far to long to post even partially. SuperCard technical support has told me the following: 1) It may be a memory fragmentation error caused by having windows opened and closed frequently. I know that it can't be having too many windows open, because I tried closing windows as soon as they have been searched. A suggestion was that I use the hasMemory function, but I can't figure it out. 2) Do not use the message box for the command; use "do". Originally, I was putting commands into the message box and using "type return". This seemed unwieldy, so I switched at the recommendation of SC's programmers. However, there seems to be no difference. The "Do Command" still sends a system message (I ascertained via 'trace' that it was crashing right after a system message. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. I can be reached at: hsu@cs.jhu.edu hsu_wh@jhuvms.hcf.jhu.edu - William Hsu