Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!iuvax!watmath!watmsg!mwnewman
From: mwnewman@watmsg.waterloo.edu (mike newman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: TILEforth problems
Message-ID: <35009@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Date: 9 Mar 90 07:41:27 GMT
Sender: daemon@watmath.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: mwnewman@watmsg.waterloo.edu (mike newman)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 46

I just started playing around with TILEforth a little while ago, and I can't
seem to get it quite running.  The problem seems to be occur when defining
new words.  After the third definition of any word whose name is longer than
three characters, I get:

	foreground#250880: signal#11: segmentation violation

I know it sounds rather strange, but
	: word-a 1 2 3 .s ;
	: word-b 4 5 6 .s ;
	: word-c 7 8 9 .s ;
causes the error while
	: a 1 2 3 .s ;
	: b 1 2 3 .s ;
	: c 1 2 3 .s ;
does not.  There can be an arbitrary number of words with three or less
character names interspersed: as soon as the third one with more than three
is defined, I get the error.  The words can be constants or variables as well.

After some dbx-ing, I discovered that it is malloc that is crashing.
Specifically, it is when malloc is called for the second time by makeentry
(to allocate space for the name string).  It is being called with a
reasonable value.  And I didn't notice anything unusual about previous
calls to malloc, except that they were returning successively lower values
of memory, where before (during TILE's start up) they had been returning
successively higher values.

More tracing reveals that the 250880 above is the value returned by malloc
the last time it is called in TILE's start up sequence, ie. just before
the interactive loop is entered.

I haven't tried much, but "regular" kinds of words seem to work ok if I stick
to defining them with names of three or less characters.

All the tst/*.tst benchmarks do this as well, except fibonacci.tst (even
though it does have four names longer than three characters ...?)


I'm on a microVAX running 4.3 bsd unix.

Has anyone seen anything like this?  Or even vaguely similar?  Any help at
all would be greatly appreciated.

mike
mwnewman@watmsg.waterloo.edu
my sig is vry sml bec I can ony use shr wds.  :-(