Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucdavis!iris!moster
From: moster@iris.ucdavis.edu (Richard Haynes Moster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: One of the worst Amiga programs ever--Manx SDB
Message-ID: <7148@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 90 03:49:23 GMT
References: <7116@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> <5557@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Sender: usenet@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
Reply-To: moster@iris.ucdavis.edu (Richard Haynes Moster)
Organization: U.C. Davis - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Lines: 46

In article <5557@sugar.hackercorp.com> karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:
>In article <7116@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> moster@iris.ucdavis.edu (Richard Haynes Moster) writes:
>>	Does anyone feel the same way I do?
>
>No, I can't say that I do.  SDB has saved me hundreds of hours of debugging
>time; I use it every day.
>
>If you want to use it with floating point, you have to use the right libraries.

	I've been very careful about using just the libraries they
tell me to use in the manual.  Besides, I'm not having trouble with
floating point anymore--that was the one shortcoming they seemed to
have fixed in this update.

>If you don't want it to crash, don't compile with optimization.  That is 
>documented.

	I don't compile with optimization.  The only switches I use
are to indicate the name of the precompiled include file, to invoke
QuickFix, and to compile the program for SDB.

>Also, don't resize the window during startup until SDB has finished writing
>to it for the first time.  Bogus, admittedly, but hardly fatal.

	I don't normally touch the window, although about 35% of the
time if I waited for SDB to finish writing to it for the first time I
would die in front of the screen since it bombs out even before
writing to the window.

>Granted, it's not perfect, and it does have some problems with arrays, although
>that seems to be more with command-line-specified indexes -- it doesn't always
>get the index right, so you have to go 0, 2, 4, instead of 0, 1, 2, but... one
>of the worst programs ever on the Amiga???  Hardly.  In my book, as a 
>developer, despite its flaws, one of the most useful ever.

	Well, maybe I'm just not holding my mouth right and maybe I'm
using it at the wrong time of day and maybe I'm wearing the wrong
color shirt.  But seriously, I got used to using Microsoft's CodeView
on an IBM AT and it always seem to work perfectly.  But with SDB I
just feel like I'm treading on thin ice and I discover new bugs
every time I use it (assuming it runs at all).  Someone just e-mailed
me telling me that it doesn't correctly print out unsigned shorts,
either.  In fact, Manx admits SDB has a lot of bugs--they told to me
use the old version until they could fix the new one! 

--Richard