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From: cjdb@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Charles Blair)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: A peculiar MASM problem
Message-ID: <644@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 24-Sep-86 22:06:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: sphinx.644
Posted: Wed Sep 24 22:06:44 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Sep-86 01:01:00 EDT
Distribution: na
Organization: U. Chicago Computation Center
Lines: 37
Keywords: Push/pop



I can't think of a better place to request help on the following
problem, so here goes.

I have been working on an 8086 assembler problem that has seven source
files. I installed push/pop in it and have been using it for a while
without problems. For greater ease of maintenance, I broke one module
into two.  Since then, push only works the first time it is invoked,
not the second and subsequent times; I've determined that the push proc
is being called, but it seems to return to the caller without executing
any of the code. From then on the program seems to work fine: it
doesn't hang. However, if executing the program from SYMDEB, I have no
problems pushing to the exec as many times as I want (so the debugger
per se is useless in helping me to localize the problem). Also, if I
run the program as a child of itself (i.e., push out of it the first
time, then reload it), I also have no problems pushing out at will. But
when I exit to DOS and then exit back to the parent, again I can't
push, since I've already pushed once. One final observation: if I
eliminate one of the source files in the link step (and I've tried
it with three files in turn, with the same result), push/pop again
works fine, every time.

I've looked at the obvious, like not terminating data segments
properly, not deallocating too much memory before pushing, and so on.

Clearly, I can't expect any reader of this to help me on the basis of
the short description of the problem I have given, unless such a reader
has encountered a similar problem. I'd be interested in hearing from
any such reader, since I can't formulate a proper hypothesis as to the
cause of the problem given the program behavior clues as indicated
above. Thanks in advance.


-- 
Charles Blair   			    ..!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!cjdb
The University of Chicago		    lib.cb%chip@UChicago.Bitnet