Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!apple!well!odawa
From: odawa@well.UUCP (Michael Odawa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Lightspeed Pascal 2.0
Summary: Whatever happend to the (order of) heap display?
Message-ID: <7868@well.UUCP>
Date: 8 Dec 88 23:32:17 GMT
Reply-To: odawa@well.UUCP (Michael Odawa)
Organization: Simple Software, Mill Valley, CA
Lines: 22


As one who has the Lightspeed Pascal development system to build several
major products over the past year, I have been a great fan of LightsBug, the
LSP debugger.  In my estimation it has been and remains (despite what
follows) the finest source-level debugger on the Macintosh.  Similarly,
Think's Technical Support staff has ranked far above that of any other tool
provider.

With release of version 2.0 my esteem for LSP has continued to grow.  New
facilities have been added, and means have been found even to extend the
functionality of LightsBug.  However, there appears to have been a single
step backward.  Previous versions of LightsBug's heap display arranged
blocks within each zone in physical (i.e., address) order, making memory
management nearly simple.  The current 2.0 version appears to have abandoned
this sorting, displaying blocks in a seemingly random but definitely not
numerical order, rendering LightsBug practically useless for sophisticated
memory management.

Given the great care with which the whole LSP package has been constructed,
one would believe there must have been a good reason for sacrificing this
essential feature.  I wonder if anyone (Rich, are you there?) would be able
to explain why it was dumped overboard.