Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!hubcap!rchampe
From: rchampe@hubcap.UUCP (Richard Champeaux)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: divide by 0 problem in "info"?  Also: GOMF
Summary: GOMF and the inept programmer
Message-ID: <2914@hubcap.UUCP>
Date: 31 Aug 88 18:29:17 GMT
References: <1841@kalliope.rice.edu>
Organization: Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Lines: 42

In article <1841@kalliope.rice.edu>, phil@rice.edu (William LeFebvre) writes:
> 
> Unfortunately, I wasn't running GOMF.  Which brings me to another
> question.  Will GOMF catch only Gurus generated after a "Task held"
> requestor?  I made VT100 generate my favorite reproducible guru (Kermit
> BYE before doing a transfer), but GOMF didn't catch it.  I was a little
> disappointed.  Does anyone know just what it will catch?
> 

    GOMF seems to catch a lot of the system errors, both the "Task Held"
and the GURU ones.  However, it doesn't tend to catch the ones I got it for,
the ones that the programs I'm writting create.  To quote the manual:

          The third is a catastrophic system failure chaaracterized by an
     instant lockup of the entire system.  Unfortunately, this 'sudden death'
     is fatal to all programs, including GOMF.  Luckily, programmers so inept
     as to write software that does this seldom get their work published, and
     as such, this condition is very rarely encountered.

   Well I guess that makes me an inept programmer, because I get a lot of 
these.  They don't all cause a complete system lockup.  My favorite one that
GOMF misses is one that causes GOMF's "guru buster" picture to appear and
stay there.  Some times the mouse locks up, sometimes it doesn't.  I don't
even get to decode the GURU MEDITATION ERROR because it never shows up and
if I reboot, I get thrown back to kickstart.
   As far as I can tell, these are all pretty much caused by making system
calls with improperly initialized structures. (they arn't very forgiving)
Unfortunately, these are exactly the kind of errors I get when writting
programs.  Usually because either the Rom Kernel Manual's information is 
sketchy, or because one of the important steps you need to do is mentioned
in another section 15-20 pages away (or I just plain screw up :-)
     Oh well, it wouldn't be as much fun if it was all just handed to you :-)

> I'm full of questions these days...
> 
> 			William LeFebvre
> 			Department of Computer Science
> 			Rice University
> 			<phil@Rice.edu>

Rich Champeaux
Clemson University