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From: miller@cogsci.ucsd.EDU (Jeff Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal,comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Turbo Pascal/DOS Batch Heap Peculiarity
Keywords: pascal, batch, heap
Message-ID: <296@cogsci.ucsd.EDU>
Date: 16 Feb 91 06:23:30 GMT
Organization: University of California, San Diego
Lines: 35


Here's a peculiarity that's new to us, and we hope someone can help us
understand it.  The symptoms are easy to observe:

1. Compile the following program with Turbo pascal 5.0 or 6.0:

   Program Test;
   Begin
   Writeln(LongInt(HeapOrg));
   End.

2. Now make up two batch files, Test1.bat and Test2.bat

   Each has a single line:    Test

The difference between the batch files is that one ends with a
carriage return (so there is really a null line at the end of the file),
whereas the other batch file ends after the second "t" in Test.

3.  Run the batch files, and they report different HeapOrg's!!!!!!

Anyone know why this is?  (Choose one from column A and one from column B)
    A       B
   DOS     Bug
  Turbo    Feature

Any suggestions on how to handle this problem?
The peculiarity becomes a problem when we run, inside batch files, programs
that use the heap-- if we forget that final carriage return, there goes the
FAT table.

Thanks for any insights you can offer.

Jeff Miller
jomiller@ucsd.edu