[Tfug] Holy Wars!

John Karns johnkarns at gmail.com
Wed Mar 12 20:13:02 MST 2008


On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 7:18 PM, Bexley Hall <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  Under *DOS*, I fell in love with Brief (inspired by
>  EMACS but probably 100X faster!)
>
>  Unfortunately, Borland (Inprise?) never released
>  it after buying it from Solution Systems...  :<
>  (it has some nasty timing loops that just don't
>  work well on machines running 100-1000X faster
>  than the original machines on which it ran  :< )

Unfortunately, it contained bugs far more serious than that.  Namely,
a _really_ nasty bug in that it either

a) wouldn't do garbage collection after de-allocating memory used for
running macros,

- or -

b) wouldn't release de-allocated memory to the heap.

It may have gone un-noticed by the majority of users, but anyone who
used a major macro package (remember dBrief?) would, depending on how
extensively that person used the macros, eventually find himself
staring at the fatal message "all memory exhausted" dialog box, then
be unceremoniously dumped at the Dos prompt after acknowledging the
message.

Quickly to follow would be the gnashing of teeth to an extent in
proportion to the product of the interval of time that had passed
since the last global file save and the number of modified file
buffers that had yet to be saved to disk.

I have no idea to what extent Borland used the Brief code (ISTR that
they used it to replace / augment the editor used in their various IDE
packages), but I doubt that the macros included were large enough to
trigger the problem very often, if the bug was still crawling around
in the code.  Perhaps Borland fixed or minimized it ...

There was a contemporary to Brief, called "MultiEdit" that was for the
most part, syntax compatible to Brief.  Scratch that - Brief macro
syntax was very Lisp-like, while ME's was more C-like, IIRC.  ME
didn't seem to suffer from the memory allocation problem, so was much
more stable.  dBrief was ported to ME.

</dos editor trivia>

-- 
John




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