🚀 go-pugleaf

I just received my TC++ pro materials last week.  And while I am
fairly impressed with it, I have had one "accident" that I want to
tell others about.  It suggests two problems.

My system: Model 70 (20mhz 386), PC DOS 4.01, QEMM.SYS 4.2.

I had been working for some time on a C file, but hadn't done the
usual archiving I do every few hours.  I pressed F2 (save file)
and wham! -- a big hard crash with:

110
???

in the upper left corner of the display (I'd experienced this once
earlier that day while debugging within the IDE).  Aside from the
usual "Oh!  I *hate* that!" reaction, I wasn't worried: I'd expe-
rienced this often with WordPerfect 5.1 *before* WPCorp. modified
WP to work around *problematic EMS drivers*.

   First problem: if this is the same problem WPC had, watch out
   for TC and the 4.2 version of QEMM.SYS.  Probably the real
   problem is QEMM.SYS, not TC.EXE.  N.B.: QEMM.SYS passes the
   emstest.com testing program no sweat.  These crashes were ut-
   terly random, just as they'd been when WP had problems.

The more important problem:

   When I rebooted, the file I'd been editing had been truncated
   to 0 length as though TC (re)created the file and was about to
   write its editor buffer when the crash occurred.  TC apparently
   doesn't take the safe approach: write a temp file and when
   safely done delete the old version and rename the new.

My lesson: turn "editor backup" ON!

-- 
Frank Burleigh  burleigh@cica.cica.indiana.edu
USENET: ...rutgers!iuvax!cica!burleigh BITNET: BURLEIGH@IUBACS.BITNET
Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405