[Coco] OS-9 Pascal

[John Donaldson]

Fred,
   Looking at a printout of the source code, I found that it Hard Codes 
directories. In this day and
age, that is not good. Since it does look for the editor and Ramdrive in 
QP.INIT, this is a good place
to also add CMD directory. That way you don't have to put everything in 
/DD/CMDS. After a while
things start to get messy. For example take a look at the SYSTEM and 
SYSTEM32 Directories on
a MSDOS machine. Programs put everything there. If I want to move a 
program package from one
machine to another, chances are it will fail, because you don't know 
which DLL's belong to what
program package. Even MSDOS will load DLL's from the working directory, 
but a lot of programmers
still want to stuff evrything into either SYSTEM or SYSTEM32. One day 
this bit us in the rear. We bought
a program package that had customized a DLL and the installtion routine 
put the DLL into SYSTEM
directory. Well it over-wrote another DLL of the same name. As result 
some of our propriety software
stopped working. I contacted the dealer and he agreed that that was a 
problem. He sent us a new
install routine that put the DLL in the working directory.
  Hard coding used to be OK when we had floppies. You just made a boot 
disk for Pascal another for
C and ect. Today with hard drives, you don't do that, so hard coding is 
not the way to go now. I have
found the same with screen sizes. Many packages used only 32 character 
screens. Today we use 80
column screens and sometimes the old package doesn't work with a 80 
column screen.
  I glad yours is working for you. I am going to see if I can get rid of 
the Hard Coding and make it more
robust. I also found that if an error poped for any reason before it got 
to displaying the menu, it would
cause the routine to start over. I'm going to see about fixing that too. 
That seems to be what is happing
with mine.
   I'll post email if I get everything working for my system. NitrOS9 
with Term_80,  80T drives and
Hard Disk.

John Donaldson


Frederick D Provoncha wrote:

>On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 13:22:31 -0500 John Donaldson
><jadonaldson at charter.net> writes:
>  
>
>>  I have gotten a little farther. I copied PascalErrs to the /DD/CMDS 
>>
>>directory. It now get pass that
>>and looks like it does the directery listing of /R0. At least I 
>>think it 
>>does. It clears the screen and the
>>listing is displayed then the screen clears again and it starts the 
>>
>>excuting  "qp.startup" over and over.
>>  According to the docs, it is suppose to display the contents of 
>>/R0 
>>and then prompt you for the name
>>of the source code file. So it is almost working.
>>   Is the Basci09 source for the modules in "QP" avaible. I suppect 
>>the 
>>problem may be in one of these or
>>there is something else I'm not doing correctly.
>>
>>John Donaldson
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, the source files are included in the download. I found 2 source
>files: 'qp.b09', and 'sieve.b09'. I have Quick Pascal running on my
>Coco's hard drive under NitrOS-9 without a problem. Perhaps you need to
>make a change to your 'qp.startup' file? List the contents of the file.
>It's a pretty small file, what does it say?
>
>Fred Provoncha
>Stansbury Park, UT
>
>  
>