dieter@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Dieter Rothmeier) (08/10/88)
Has anybody bought Aztec's source debugger, and what do they have to say about it? Thanks, Dieter Rothmeier
newton@mtund.UUCP (08/10/88)
In article <15112@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>, dieter@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Dieter Rothmeier) writes: > > Has anybody bought Aztec's source debugger, and what do they have to say about it? We've been using Aztec's dbx, a multi-window source debugger for Aztec C. It's pretty good. Newton Lee AT&T Bell Laboratories
phd@speech1.cs.cmu.edu (Paul Dietz) (08/11/88)
In article <15112@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> dieter@cs.ucla.edu (Dieter Rothmeier) writes: > >Has anybody bought Aztec's source debugger, and what do they have to say about it? > After waiting many (>5) weeks for my LSC upgrade to arrive, I decided to get the upgrade for my old Aztec package. In great contrast to LSC, it arrived a mere three days later! So here's the good news and the bad news: sdb runs well on limited memory machines, WHEN IT RUNS. It appears to have a much better understanding of variable types than LSC's debugger, automatically printing out detailed structures when asked. The user interface isn't as slick as LSC's, but it's quite reasonable (especially for those used to dbx.) Unfortunately, sdb is amazingly buggy. In my first hour with it, I must have crashed my machine at least 10 times! I have even generated files which crash sdb when it just tries to open it! (This took all of another hour before I hit it.) Maybe I'm doing something wrong. But I never have these sorts of problems with LSC. (Though, trying to run LSC's debugger in less than 2 Meg has proved challenging at times...) One other thing that pissed me off: Manx sends out its upgrades on used floppies which you are supposed to copy and return! One of the disks I got gave me errors the second time I tried to read it! Pretty shoddy in my book! Especially considering how much they charge for their update service! Is there anyone from Manx who reads this bboard? I'd love to send in bug reports, but I'm not going to make a long distance phone call at 1200 baud to do it! Paul H. Dietz ____ ____ Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering / oo \ <_<\\\ Carnegie Mellon University /| \/ |\ \\ \\ -------------------------------------------- | | ( ) | | | ||\\ "If God had meant for penguins to fly, -->--<-- / / |\\\ / he would have given them wings." _________^__^_________/ / / \\\\-
dxjsb@dcatla.UUCP (Jack S. Brindle) (08/12/88)
in his message, phd@speech1.cs.cmu.edu (Paul Dietz) says: > Unfortunately, sdb is amazingly buggy. In my first hour with it, I must > have crashed my machine at least 10 times! I have even generated > files which crash sdb when it just tries to open it! (This took Gee, in a month of use, I have YET to crash the debugger. My own code has gone nuts, but the debugger does catch it. Makes me wonder, though, about a debugger that is meant to run as a task under multifinder (as Think's does), what happens when MF is caused to crash by the application under test (comments LSCers?). > One other thing that pissed me off: Manx sends out its upgrades on used > floppies which you are supposed to copy and return! One of the disks > I got gave me errors the second time I tried to read it! Pretty shoddy > in my book! Especially considering how much they charge for their > update service! I agree on the first point. Disks are pretty cheap. I would far prefer to keep the disks as archives than return them. On the other hand, the disks I DO archive the Manx stuff on are far better quality than what they ship. I did have problems with the latest upgrade - quite a few of the files were trashed on the original (yet the disk structure was correct). I called Manx's upgrade department & had replacements two days later. That's about the best service I have had from ANYONE! Now about the pricing - we bought Aztec C for the Mac back in 1984 when it first came out. The system came with its normal 1 year upgrade plan. I received quite a few upgrades over the next few years. Finally, in mid 1986 Manx notified us of expiration of the upgrades. We responded by buying the service contract. They shipped exactly one upgrade under that policy before it expired a year later. We renewed the policy since it looked like great things were about to happen. It took a LONG time, but with Version 3.6B it looks like we got what we wanted. So now we have spent, in addition to the original system price ($500 I believe), $250 for two years up service and the SDB package. That includes the MPW package that came with 3.6B. Looking at the APDA catalog that came yesterday, the MPW system costs $200. Looks like we got a bargain. Not only that, but when Apple releases new MPW C include and glue files, they will link into Aztec C. That will save on upgrade costs as well. Now we do have some other problems with the system, like the way they treat pointers to Pascal functions (they are ALWAYS declared globally!). But they seem to be doing a good job working things out. Oh well. On the other hand, my order for the LSC upgrade goes out tomorrow (five weeks delay, huh. sigh). We actually use MPW, Aztec AND LSC around here. Makes life interesting :-). Jack Brindle