PSIG 17: Thursday September 3rd, 1998

I didn't realize Labor Day was this weekend, so many folks had Friday off, and I'm lucky 4 folks showed up.

I ran into a mysterious bug in my BBEdit plugin. I brought on this bug myself -- I got cocky and didn't insert my automatic bug detection system into the new code.

"Automatic Bug Detection?", you ask. Sure. C gives you assert(), a #defined macro function that stops the program when it hits an expression that evaluates to false. Sprinkle assert()s throughout your code and your program will halt as soon as an assumption is broken. Best of all, assert()s magically disappear with a flick of a #define statement, resulting in no overhead when your program is ready to ship.

assert() is dandy, though too lightweight. I tried to introduce my Macintosh-specific turbo-charged version of assert that checks pointer validity, handle validity, FSSpec validity and more. However, my system depends on DebugStr(), and MacsBug wasn't installed on the presentation machine. So I copied MacsBug from my Duo, only to watch the 8500 crash on startup.

It turns out the 8500 requires at least MacsBug 6.5.4a4, while my Duo had 6.5.4a2. But I didn't know that, so I wasn't able to demo my code. In addition, I squashed my BBEdit plugin bug, however with the new automatic bug detection code in place (which requires MacsBug), I couldn't demo my plugin!

The 8500's system software was in bad shape -- we couldn't get Script Editor/AppleScript working.

Thursday, September 03, 1998
12:00 AM