# New Ticket Created by "Clinton A. Pierce"
# Please include the string: [netlabs #522]
# in the subject line of all future correspondence about this issue.
# <URL: http://bugs6.perl.org/rt2/Ticket/Display.html?id=522 >
Sometime during or shortly after the 0.0.5 release, BASIC broke with
string/stack/GC errors. During program LOAD, Parrot runs off eats a ton of
memory (sometimes) and falls over dead (eventually). Someone else in
#parrot tried the exact same test without problems. I'm dismayed.
To reproduce this bug under any post 0.0.5 CVS update:
* Go into the languages/BASIC directory
* Start basic using the handler:
C:\projects\perl\parrot\languages\BASIC>basic.pl
Including stackops.pasm
Including alpha.pasm
Including dumpstack.pasm
Including tokenize.pasm
Including basicvar.pasm
Including basic.pasm
Including instructions.pasm
Including expr.pasm
4050 lines
Ready
* Immediately load wumpus (it won't finish):
LOAD wumpus
LOADING wumpus.bas...
* Wait for segfault (it takes a couple of minutes on my P300).
* While you're waiting, watch memory be eaten by Parrot.
Calling the sweepoff and collectoff have no effect other than to make the
memory-eating much more impressive (and the crash more spectacular). I've
got Parrot compiled under Win32 (Win2k) with MSVC++.
**
I'd like to offer that BASIC could somehow be incorporated into the test
suite for Parrot? Would it help? It's awfully sensitive to problems with
strings, stacks, etc. As a general rule, if you can get something like
wumpus.bas to load and run in BASIC then things are healthier than not.
I could modify BASIC to help. For example, an alternate basic.pl that
would create a "batch" version of BASIC instead of an interactive
one. (All of the interactive code is in that short Perl script.) To run
BASIC in batch mode is simply a matter of replacing MAIN in basic.pl with a
MAIN that does something like:
save 0 # Seed the runtime stack
save "LOAD wumpus"
bsr RUNLINE
save "RUN"
bsr RUNLINE
restore I0 # Run's status
end
This is how my test harness works so I don't have to type programs at it,
or wear out my capslock key.
