ix454@sdccs6.UUCP (11/17/83)
As far as the debugger goes, the debugger is in the IV.0 and up releases of the p-System including the Apple II implementation. I have never really used it myself, but from the documentation, it looks a little confusing The file system, to my knowledge, requires contiguous files as a feature, not a 'flaw'. Many times I have been glad that this is the case when trying to reconstruct a file from disks with damaged directories. As far as I am concerned, floppy disks can be so inherently unreliable, that if contiguous files were not required, a bad block on the directory would make the disk unrecoverable. (I manage an undergraduate lab for ~600 students on 43 IBM PC's and they are always having disk problems due to bent or damaged disks, etc.) It might be nice for an option that would let files be non-contiguous on hard disks, but that would require major directory changes. Besides, on the IV.2 release, I'm not sure whether files will still need to be contiguous. There is supposed to be a tree structured file system (trees - the shape of directories to come), so non-contiguous files would probably need to be supported for a decent implementation. It is true that the U- compiler option in the II.n releases allows access to system globals, but you need to have a copy of the globals declaration. Also, your main procedure must be a segment procedure taking 2 dummy integer parameters (on versions II.1 and earlier). It gets confusing very quickly. Flames, comments, etc. accepted. -- Allyn Fratkin U.C. San Diego