🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9211052103.AA07580@horton.jhuapl.edu> randy@horton.jhuapl.edu (Randall L. Schrickel NDM) writes:

>[QBX memory woes]

>I'm now spending all of my time trying to figure out this problem instead of
>writing and debugging new code!

Welcome to the big leagues. Until you've reached the point where most of
your time is spent trading off memory limits, you're not a REAL Quick 
Basic programmer.

Reread all of the manual discussions on QBX and BC memory handling 
at least fourteen times. Get all of the KnowledgeBase additions and
errata to the PDS manual (GEnie, CIS, or is there an FTP option?).
Then experiment wildly. Above all, remember that _any_ variable
length string array DIM/REDIM uses something like eight bytes per
array element in DGROUP. The only way to get out of this is dynamic
fixed length string arrays, which means that you lose most of BASIC's
string-handling advantages.

Finally, know that there are lots of odd, undocumented requirements
for QBX to run. I found that memory problems got tractable only 
after I went with a single QBX module. I then wrote a utility 
program to break up that muthuh-module into lots (28 at last count)
of modules for BC compilation and RTLINK overlaying.

If anybody is interested in that utility, please e-mail me. It saved
a programmer who was crying the blues on GEnie.
 
If your program is going to get 
big (> 20K lines, say), PDS may not be the system to use. 

I haven't ported my application over to QBDOS yet--it may be better.
At least string literals aren't in DGROUP.