Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!oddjob!ncar!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!hplabs!hp-pcd!hpcvlx!everett
From: everett@hpcvlx.HP.COM (Everett Kaser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Microsoft Editor: problems
Message-ID: <1180024@hpcvlx.HP.COM>
Date: 23 May 88 17:59:42 GMT
References: <1180018@hpcvlx.HP.COM>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Co., Corvallis, OR, USA
Lines: 75

After posting this base note to the net, I got access to Dial (Microsoft's
support BBS, for which you have to pay for access, I understand...luckily
HP (our site, anyway) has an account) and posted a TAR discussing the 
problems I noted in this base note (but in a little more reasonable voice).
I received both phone and electronic (on Dial) responses from Microsoft
within 24 hours, and final responses on all items within 3 days.  All
responses were reasonable, complete, and satisfactory (given that some of
the problems were bugs, and not much could be done until a new revision
is available).

Briefly, there responses were:

  1)  "Your first question addresses the values stored in M.TMP for the 
       height and width of the screen overrides the values set in TOOLS.INI.
       This is true, and I have notified our Documentation Staff to include
       this in future updates to the M User's Guide.  If you want TOOLS.INI
       to override the settings in M.TMP, you will need to "initialize" this
       file.  This is done with the INITIALIZE function (entering SHIFT+F8
       if using default settings, SHIFT+F10 if using Quick C, WordStar,
       BRIEF, or EPSILON settings).  This function is mentioned on pages 91
       and 98 of the User's Guide.
  2)   After checking with their technical people, the support person I 
       was talking to reported that there did appear to be a problem with
       the parameter passing for a NULLARG type function (when writing an
       extension.  In the meantime I had discovered a number of user-callable
       functions in the file EXT.DOC that were not listed or documented in
       the manual, including one called GetCursor, which returned the current
       x/y location of the cursor.  Because of this, I told the support
       person that I didn't need an immediate solution to that bug, as I
       had a work-around.
  3)   The problem with the missing information in README.DOC was actally
       in file UTILITY.DOC on the SETUP disk (as has been pointed out here
       on the net in a response to my base note).
  4)   My comments in regard to the general documentation problem were
       "passed on to the documentaion staff".

The solution to the 43-line mode problem that I had come up with before
Microsoft's response was to simply go into the M editor, put it into 43-line
mode (with the "Arg Height:41 Assign" command sequence), then exit the editor.
The editor would then update the M.TMP file with the height set to 41.  From
then on out, 41 would be used unless the procedure were repeated to change it.
It still seems to me to be a bug.

In the meantime, I've found several more problems, which I've included in 
another TAR to Microsoft, which I posted on Friday (the 20th) and is still
being processed (today is Monday the 23rd).  They are:

  1)  fExecute ("Meta Exit") seems to cause the M.TMP file to be updated,
      but does NOT cause the editor to terminate.  I'm trying to make M look
      more like Emacs (which I'm used to) and need to map an exit function
      onto a two-keystroke sequence (^X^C) along with many other ^X 
      two-keystroke functions.  Hence, I can't simply remap the function to 
      the key, but need to be able to call the EXIT function from within my
      extension program.
  2)  If BIOS.H (from C compiler) is included AFTER EXT.H (from MSedit), a
      compile error occurs:
           c:\include\bios.h (84) : error C2059: syntax error: 'typedef name'
      But, if BIOS.H is included BEFORE EXT.H, everything works fine.
  3)  FYI only.  In the sample extension SKEL.C, when I compile it under
      C 5.1, I get one warning on the last line of the swiTable and two
      warnings on the last line of the cmdTable, because of the NULL def-
      inition used when an unsigned or int is required.  I took care of this
      by replacing those three NULL usages with a literal 0.
  4)  Using the sprintf function from the SLIBCE library (which, according
      to the file UTILITY.DOC, is ok to use) seems to try to link in the CRT0
      module which causes two link errors:
         __acrtused defined more than once
         _main unresolved
  5)  In the file UTILITY.DOC on the SETUP disk of the C 5.1 compiler, the
      function ReadCmd is described as being of type PCMD, whereas in the 
      file EXT.H it's defined as type PSWI.

Everett Kaser
!hplabs!hp-pcd!everett
(503) 750-3569