Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!moore!paul
From: paul@moore.UUCP (Paul Maclauchlan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
Subject: Problem with )COPY
Keywords: STSC APL*PLUS/UNX
Message-ID: <575@moore.UUCP>
Date: 19 Apr 89 19:10:52 GMT
Organization: Moore Corporation Limited, Toronto ON, Canada
Lines: 87


When trying to clean up a heavily used workspace on the system
we attempted to create a new "clean" version by:

1. )CLEAR, to make a fresh space for the new ws

2. )SYMB 3000, to match the symbol table size in the old ws

3. )COPY OLDWS

4. Assign QuadLX and QuadELX

5. )WSID OLDWS

6. )SAVE

This had been our "traditional" way of generating clean copies
of old workspaces on IPSA and Comshare's APL.

At step 3, we got an error message:

	NOT COPIED: VAR1 VAR2

This was unusual, the documentation claims this can only happen
if the active workspace was full, the symbol table was full or
the saved workspace was damaged.  We ruled out one and two, but
didn't know what to do about three.

Since the variables that weren't copied were small ('',QuadCR, etc)
we recreated them and continued.  Now we thought we had a clean,
new version of the original ws.

Out of curiousity about the error message, we tried the procedure
again.  This time starting with our second generation ws.  The same
thing happened, but this time with different variables not being 
copied.

We stopped, cleared the active ws and did another )COPY.  Same
error, different variables.

We tried QuadCOPY and received a result value of -3, "cannot copy
while name is defined as a label".  None of the variables share
names with labels in any of the functions.

Further experimenting revealed that if we eliminated step 2 of
our procedure, the )SYMB 3000, all of the variables were copied
correctly.

Our questions are as follows:

1. Why does setting the symbol table size affect the )COPY command?

	1a. Shouldn't matching the symbol table size to that of
	    the original workspace be the "right thing" to do?

	1b. Have we encountered some kind of limit to the size
	    of the symbol table?  The documentation claims the
	    Symbol-limit is 32767.

2. Are the )COPY and QuadCOPY commands reliable?

3. Is our procedure for "cleaning up" old workspaces appropriate?

	3a. Does it make a difference in system performance to
	    have a "clean" workspace?

	3b. Does it make a difference in performance to use a
	    workspace saved with a value assigned to QuadDM?

	3c. How are we supposed to fix a "damaged" workspace?


Any help we can get answering these questions will be appreciated.


Technical notes:
Some background, we are running STSC APL*PLUS/UNX 3.1.1 for the
Spectrix computer, under SCO XENIX Version 3.1.  The workspace we
are copying is in a Xenix file 176,000 bytes long.  We start APL
with a workspace size of 500,000 bytes.

-- 
--
.../Paul Maclauchlan
Moore Corporation Limited, Toronto, Ontario (416) 364-2600
paul@moore.UUCP  -or-    ...!uunet!attcan!telly!moore!paul
"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."/JL&PMcC'69