Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!indri!xanth!mcnc!rti!sas!cole
From: cole@sas.UUCP (Tom Cole)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Help for MPW/MacAPP neophyte?
Keywords: mpw macapp pascal help
Message-ID: <1004@sas.UUCP>
Date: 21 Apr 89 13:56:35 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: SAS Institute Inc.,Cary NC,25712
Lines: 66

Okay, I am moderately knowlegeable about the Macintosh, but utterly ignorant
of MPW and MacApp.  Here's the setup:

	o	About a year and a half ago, I purchased MPW 2.0, since
		it seemed like the environment that everyone was using
		to build production software, although I did (and still
		do) prefer the interactivity of the Lightspeed (now THINK)
		software environments, and the debugger was closer to my
		idea of fun.

	o	I fiddled around with MPW, and decided that MacApp would
		be fun, so I got MacApp 1.0 or thereabouts.  Compiled the
		sample programs, started to write a trivial program myself,
		and got sidetracked by the demon god of employment.

	o	Recently, I hear that 1) MPW is really cool in 3.0, 2) if
		you don't known object programming you will be left in the
		dust, and 3) MPW now has symbolic debugging.  So I bought
		the MacApp 2.0 "interim" upgrade and the MPW 3.0 upgrade 
		bundled with Assembler, SADE, and Pascal.  So I figure I
		have the most current stuff.

Okay, you can derive from the above history that I think I have all the
tools, but have next to zero experience using them.  That's what I want
to get.

So the other night I decided to resurrect all this stuff and build a hard
disk with MPW et. al. on it.  MPW installs okay, and I drag the MacAPP stuff
over as per the instructions.  I then attempt to build one of the samples,
the "Calc" program.  Several things happen:

I get messages indicating unsafe use of object data or > 4 byte values when
compiling UMacAPP.p and its children.  So I opened up MABuild (never before
seen this) and guessed that I could add Pascal options to the Pascal3Options
shell variable.  So I add a -h to supress these warnings so MABuild can
continue.

Next I get messages from within a TEView module for a function(method?) named
IdentifyPoint indicating illegal function call usage (not enough parameters).
It looks like the code is trying to use the function result as a value on the
right side of the := after it has been set into the function result pseudo-
variable.  So I make a new variable and always set it to the desired function
result instead of IdentifyPoint itself, and at the end set the function
result to my variable.  So far so good.  I can now MABuild the CALC example,
with DEBUG selected.  It seems to work, though not well - I can't tell if
my changes screwed it up or there are problems with the example. I realize
here that I have lots to learn.

Finally, I tried to MABUILD with OPT and NODEBUG to make a "clean" version
of the application, just to see what the differences are.  Now I get even
more of the pascal warnings about unsafe object usage, etc.  At this point
I can't figure out where to suppress the warning, if indeed it is desirable
to do so.

HELP!  Conclusion:  I don't really know what is going on, but it sure feels
like either my software isn't as up-to-date as I think (obvious problem is
the MacApp 2.0.2 stuff) or I am confused about what I am doing.  Any
suggestions?  RTFM is an acceptable response, but it sure with help if
you would supply a chapter/page number in the FM to R.

Thanks for any help you can offer...


Tom Cole
SAS Institute
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