Problems under OSx 5.0

Barry Allebone barry at bain3.UUCP
Thu Nov 15 11:46:59 AEST 1990



We are running a 9810 and have recently upgraded to OSx 5.0.

Our application is a mixture of C and Pascal and uses Curses.

Following the upgrade we could no longer rebuild our
application.  There turned out to be problems in Pascal
C and Curses which are discussed here in order to save
others the time I spent sorting things out.

a)	the new Pascal compiler dumped core on some of our
	.P files - this problem has gone to the USA and 
	we have gone back to the previous version of the
	the Pascal system.

b)	using the Pascal construct:

		writeln(pfile, floatvar:width:places);

	hangs the executeable IF it is linked with the att
	curses library.  This turned out to be caused by a
	text segment name _MAX defined in both
	/usr/lib/libcurses.a and /usr/lib/libpc.a
	(the Pascal intrinsics and i/o library).  This name
	is defined in both old and new Pascal systems but is
	new in the att curses package.  It has to do with
	support for colour terminals which we don't have so
	our work around is to explicitly mention libpc.a in
	the ld line prior to the curses library.  There is
	no problem in the ucb universe since this version
	of curses has not been updated.

c)	the new version of the C compiler has changed the
	(implementation dependant) order of evaluation of
	sub-expressions so some grotty code no longer works
	viz:

		j = (--key * 9) + (key / 4) * 3;

	In the case where key starts at 4 this expression
	now sets j to 30 where it used to set it to 27.
	I know the code is off, but I didn't write it and
	forwarned is forarmed !!



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