Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!rutgers!gatech!dcatla!dxjsb
From: dxjsb@dcatla.UUCP (Jack S. Brindle)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Aztec source level debugger
Keywords: Manx, sdb, debugger
Message-ID: <7928@dcatla.UUCP>
Date: 12 Aug 88 14:15:08 GMT
References: <15112@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <2669@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: dxjsb@sunb.UUCP (Jack S. Brindle)
Distribution: na
Organization: DCA Inc., Alpharetta, GA
Lines: 45

in his message, phd@speech1.cs.cmu.edu (Paul Dietz) says:
> Unfortunately, sdb is amazingly buggy. In my first hour with it, I must
> have crashed my machine at least 10 times! I have even generated
> files which crash sdb when it just tries to open it! (This took

Gee, in a month of use, I have YET to crash the debugger. My own code
has gone nuts, but the debugger does catch it. Makes me wonder, though,
about a debugger that is meant to run as a task under multifinder (as
Think's does), what happens when MF is caused to crash by the application
under test (comments LSCers?).

> One other thing that pissed me off: Manx sends out its upgrades on used
> floppies which you are supposed to copy and return! One of the disks
> I got gave me errors the second time I tried to read it! Pretty shoddy
> in my book! Especially considering how much they charge for their
> update service!

I agree on the first point. Disks are pretty cheap. I would far prefer to
keep the disks as archives than return them. On the other hand, the disks
I DO archive the Manx stuff on are far better quality than what they ship.
I did have problems with the latest upgrade - quite a few of the files were
trashed on the original (yet the disk structure was correct). I called
Manx's upgrade department & had replacements two days later. That's about
the best service I have had from ANYONE!
Now about the pricing - we bought Aztec C for the Mac back in 1984 when it
first came out. The system came with its normal 1 year upgrade plan. I
received quite a few upgrades over the next few years. Finally, in mid 1986
Manx notified us of expiration of the upgrades. We responded by buying
the service contract. They shipped exactly one upgrade under that policy
before it expired a year later. We renewed the policy since it looked like
great things were about to happen. It took a LONG time, but with Version
3.6B it looks like we got what we wanted. So now we have spent, in addition
to the original system price ($500 I believe), $250 for two years up 
service and the SDB package. That includes the MPW package that came with
3.6B. Looking at the APDA catalog that came yesterday, the MPW system
costs $200. Looks like we got a bargain. Not only that, but when Apple
releases new MPW C include and glue files, they will link into Aztec C.
That will save on upgrade costs as well. 
   Now we do have some other problems with the system, like the way they
treat pointers to Pascal functions (they are ALWAYS declared globally!).
But they seem to be doing a good job working things out.
Oh well. On the other hand, my order for the LSC upgrade goes out tomorrow
(five weeks delay, huh. sigh). We actually use MPW, Aztec AND LSC around here.
Makes life interesting :-).
Jack Brindle