henry (08/05/82)
Some friends of mine at Rhodnius Inc., running on a System/8000 (a Z8000 box from Zilog) report that spell(1) has a tendency to go into infinite loops if one has too many big environment variables. It is right against the wall on the 16-bit address space, and that little extra bit of space consumption blows things up. On the PDP11 it's not so crowded, so I have been unable to reproduce this problem on my 11/44, but it may still be there. The Rhodnius folks have only a binary license, so I have no way to find out whether Zilog has fooled around with the source.