Update on "ORCA troubles galore"

[mcafee@umich.edu (Sean McAfee)]

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions regarding my loopy compiler.

Here's what I did since then.  I used Vulcan Utilities to format the hard
drive partition that I'd been doing all my work on.  Then, for good measure,
I zeroed all of the blocks with Prosel.  I reinstalled the system software,
GNO, and ORCA.  I got rid of my RAM disk, and shift-booted to bypass any
desk accessories or INITS (although the only two that were installed were
Sound and SetBoot).  I downloaded a fresh copy of the gnuplot source that
I'd been working on, edited all the portions that needed changing for ORCA's
sake (they were all still fresh in my mind from the last time), and tried
recompiling.

The first source file compiled fine.  On the second one, though, the
compiler started to complain once again about illegal characters.  I
exited the compiler with control-C and looked at the offending source file,
but on the line that the compiler had flagged as containing an illegal
character, I found no illegal characters.  Repeated compilations of this
file and others produced the same result.

It seems that somehow, the compiler is garbling certain (random?) characters
in the source AFTER it's read in from the file.  Can anything other than
buggy software cause this?  The only reasonable explanation I could come
up with was that some of these source files are quite large--one is ~88K
excluding header files.  But I couldn't find any warning in the ORCA
manual regarding large source files.

Oh, and I almost forgot-- Twice, I booted ORCA.Sys16 and tried compiling
from there.  Both times I got the same "illegal character" errors that
I was getting from GNO.  But once, something even weirder happened.  Midway
through a compile, the output began being restricted to a smaller region
of the text screen--the same kind of effect you get in Applesoft if you
mess with the zero-page screen-boundary bytes (does ORCA use the same
bytes?).  Vertically, the text was able to use the whole screen, but the
horizontal output was limited to (approximately) the 20th to the 50th
positions.  I interrupted the compile; the ORCA prompt was now sitting
in this restricted region.  I was able to quit normally.

In summary:  This sucks.  Might I possibly have gotten a set of disks
from the ByteWorks that accidentally passed to close to a magnet or
something?

--
Sean McAfee                                 |      /\       FORNIT       |
                                            |     /()\         SOME      |
mcafee@umich.edu                            |    /____\         FORNUS   |