Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!maytag!watstat!dmurdoch
From: dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: MS-Fortran versus Sidekick Plus
Message-ID: <103@maytag.waterloo.edu>
Date: 30 Mar 89 14:38:13 GMT
References: <98@maytag.waterloo.edu> <45900219@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: daemon@maytag.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 28

In article <45900219@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>
>>My question is:  Is the input method used by the Fortran program legal? 
>
>Yes. Service 34 is marked "reserved" in my DOS reference. 

No, it wasn't using service 34 - it was service 3F, which is the standard
read from file service.  Sorry if I had a typo in my original posting.

I've since determined that what Fortran was doing _is_ legal, and _is_ 
documented, and should have worked.  DOS is supposed to buffer input
being read from a device in ASCII mode;  for some reason Sidekick Plus
messes this up.

I've informed Borland of the bug.  They told me they were aware of problems
with SKPlus and MS Fortran, but apparently didn't know the cause of them.
If they tell me any fix, I'll post it, but I don't really expect them to.
Borland seems to be very poor at coming up with bug fixes for their products.

(But they're very good at supporting novice users. 
And it did require their Turbo Debugger with its 386 hardware
debugging support for me to find the bug in the first place - one of the
things the Fortran program does is to move its code around upon startup,
which is really frustrating if you're relying on breakpoints set in memory.
This isn't entirely a flame.)

Duncan Murdoch