Meridian and 32-bit ext mode

[agate!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!caen!uvaarpa!vger.nsu.ed u!g_harrison@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (George C. Harrison, Norfolk State University]

     We've just finished one of those ARPA Software Engineering and Ada grants.
 
Included was a student project - just completed.  We ran into some strange
problems.  If anyone has an answer, I'd like to here it.

The program in the project was written in Meridian (1,4,1) 386E Ada. 
Originally we used 16-bit extended mode.  The platforms were 486 50 mz and 486
25 mz SX.  

Structurally, the program uses 6 TEXT video pages (written to pages 1 thru 6)
and page 0 for ordinary displays, etc.  Each TEXT video page is 12000 bytes.

There are six packages for a total of about 2600 LOC.  There are no large data
structures.  As we added minor functionality, we noticed some strange 
behavior: 
  Output from a small linked list was totally corrupted.  
  The printer _automatically_ started printing junk.  
  Text from other pages were being printed to other pages when the pages 
    were functionally isolated.  
  Garbage was being printed to the dos prompt.  etc.  

I suspected that the behavior was that someing was causing the pages to be
corrupted.. order writing the heap.. or whatever.  ANY IDEAS?

We then recompiled and relinked everything under 32-bit extended mode (pages
are now 16000 becuase of larger bit sizes for types).  Every works fine.  

It appears to me that we had a heap problem since the 32-bit extended allows
for extended heap storage.  .. although we never received a storage_error
exception that we can "see." 

However, now to run the program we have to use Meridian's RAMP command like
RAMP MYPROG.  Supposedly there is a BIND command that produces a .EXE file to
run in ordinary extended mode.  Meridian, according to the docs., can provide
it, if we have a licence.  I haven't contacted them yet.  Has anyone used the
BIND from Meridian?

George

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