Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!glacier!elliott
From: elliott@glacier.steinmetz
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: davex problems and some system program questions
Message-ID: <10746@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 8 May 88 01:03:08 GMT
Sender: news@steinmetz.ge.com
Reply-To: elliott@crd.ge.com (Jim Elliott)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 51
Keywords: munged help file, startup buffers, quit code

Time pressures like classes and a part-time job have been keeping me
from doing much on my //e besides using it as a vt100 for the last
year. But now that summer is approaching, I suddenly have the time to
catch up with what has been going on, and it's quite exciting. I'm
very impressed with the way that BLU and EXECUTIONER make transfer of
apple binaries over UseNet feasible, and am getting ready to post my
own, extremely nice, terminal emulator to comp.binaries.apple2 someday
soon.

I'm also very happy to see how well ProDos has caught on (around the
people I normally talk to, ProDos is a strange and useless program,
despite my attempts to defend it as the obvious choice for system
programming on the //...)

And now, with a real command shell (davex) to use, the possibilities
are very exciting!

Now, the real point of my posting: It's become clear to me that the
rules have been changing a little since my last big bout of
programming. The davex documentation mentions the concept of system
programs having "startup buffers" where parameters can be stored. This
is either an undocumented standard, or newer than my (1983?) ProDos
technical reference manual. Can someone explain the details of how
these work?

Also, in the section describing system programs, the manual details
how to load another system routine, but nowhere does it explain the
standard quitting mechanism that many system programs seem to use,
that let them drop back into davex. Again, could someone explain this
to me? I'd like complete, accurate, technical details... *sigh* I
probably have to get to a computer store and buy a new copy of the
manual...

Finally, unfortunately, the copy of davex which was posted to
comp.binaries.apple2 has some problems: The help file is damaged and
doesn't work with half the topics, and it's missing some commands like
vstore and vrestore... As soon as I get my next paycheck I'm ordering
a registered copy, but it would be nice if I could get a working
implementation before the mail gets my disk to me...

Thanks for any help anyone can give!



 .     .    .    .   .  . ... .  .   .    .    .     .    .   .   .  . ... . .

 Jim Elliott                       /    ...!seismo!uunet!steinmetz!crd!elliott
                                  /
 "Don't look, son, it's          /      Jim_Elliott%mts@itsgw.rpi.edu [school]
  a secular humanist!"          /  (or)     elliott@ge-crd.arpa	      [work]
 .     .    .    .   .  . ... .  .   .    .    .     .    .   .   .  . ... . .