Pascal Fans,

I've recently started getting reacquainted with Pascal. I learned a bit of it back in the late '80s in college on a VAX 11/750 running DEC VMS. I've loved PascalCase ever since.

I'm working my way through the Turbo Vision 2.0 Programming Guide I found on Archive.org. Everything was working well, until chapter 4 - Using streams and resources. Saving the desktop to a stream file seemed to work, but when I attempt to reload it from the stream file I get a runtime error 101, which is odd since I'm trying to read from a file, not write to a file. It might be functionality that's not fully implemented. And it's something I doubt I'd ever use, so I'm not too concerned resolving the issue. I'll probably just move on to chapter 5 - Creating a data entry screen, which is what I'm really interested in.

Is there a Free Vision mailing list, bug tracker, etc.?

Kevin Monceaux schrieb am Do., 13. Feb. 2020, 10:57:

There is no separate mailing list for Free Vision, so this one is fine (and bugs would be reported on the normal bug tracker).

I think saving and restoring streams should work as the textmode IDE uses that as well. Can you please provide an example that fails? Then we might be able to help you.

Regards,
Sven

Sven,

Sven Barth wrote

I think saving and restoring streams should work as the textmode IDE uses that as well. Can you please provide an example that fails? Then we might be able to help you.

The example is from chapter 4 of the Turbo Vision Version 2.0 Programming Guide:

http://www.BitSavers.org/pdf/borland/Turbo_Vision_Version_2.0_Programming_Guide_1992.pdf

I don't know if attachments can be sent to the list. I'll try to attach the code I've keyed in from the book up to the point of that example.

On 2020-02-13 15:43, Kevin Monceaux wrote:

Hello Kevin,

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Attachments may be sent to the list if they aren't too big (up to 50 kB in total should be no problem).

Your attached code cannot be compiled as provided because unit TutConst is missing. The version of this unit included in the PDF doesn't contain all the needed constants, so it is clearly buggy / incomplete. In any case - please, make sure to use {$MODE TP} (or -Mtp command line parameter) if compiling code originally targetting TP/BP. Apart from that, please, let us know which issues did you get (e.g. did you resolve the missing cm* constants)?

Tomas

Tomas,

Tomas Hajny wrote

Your attached code cannot be compiled as provided because unit TutConst is missing. The version of this unit included in the PDF doesn't contain all the needed constants, so it is clearly buggy / incomplete.

Attached is the TutConst I'm using. I added the missing constants.

Kevin Monceaux wrote

What's the definition of a legacy system? One that works!

Brilliant tag line by the way! So true these days. :-D

Regards,
Graeme

It's hard to beat text terminal user interfaces for data entry efficiency. Nothing slows down a data entry clerk more than being forced to reach for a mouse.

At my current employer I started in freight bill entry and driver check in. Eventually I got my foot in the door in mainframe operations and worked as an operator for a couple of decades, first with IBM OS/390 and later z/OS. A few years ago we migrated to an IBM i, formerly known as AS/400, based platform. Now I'm an IBM i system admin. Our business still runs on "green screen" text terminal based apps, for which I'm grateful. I love legacy systems, and the style of interfaces FreeVision can produce,

Sven Barth wrote

Kevin Monceaux schrieb am Do., 13. Feb. 2020, 10:57:

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Small update - while I haven't been able to debug it fully yet, I can confirm that there seems to be an issue resulting in a SIGSEGV while trying to load the previously stored TDesktop (tried under Win64 and x86_64-linux - interestingly not getting RTE101 as reported by Kevin, but it might be due to a different target platform and/or different version). As far as I can see, our textmode IDE uses different approach to restoring the stream which is probably the reason why the issue isn't triggered there.

Tomas

Kevin Monceaux schrieb am Sa., 15. Feb. 2020, 18:24:

Though to be fair such a "guided data entry" approach can be implemented with a GUI just as much as much as it can with a TUI.

In fact I know a company that simply turned their TUI-based entry masks into GUI-based entry masks.

Regards,
Sven