Re: Some questions and tidbits

Shaw Terwilliger (sterwill@postman.abisource.com)
Thu, 10 Jun 1999 21:56:57 -0500


On Thu, Jun 10, 1999 at 07:29:02PM -0700, Alan Young wrote:
> > Yep, I get a lot of warnings there too. I believe Shaw's current plan is to
> > replace that functionality with a cleaner implementation, rather than trying
> > to fix them in place.
>
> Ah, that's good to know. I was not sure if is was 32 bit vs. 64 bit issue.

The code is 64-bit clean, as far as I know. I've got an Alpha beside my
desk at work, it runs Linux, and it's built the word importer (although
not cleanly by any means; pages and pages of warnings) and imported all
the Word97 files I've thrown at it. The Word97 importer code is all
cross-platform; same code for Unix, Mac, Win32, BeOS.

This isn't to say the code is compiled the same, though. I thought
that Windows NT was 32-bit on the Alpha; I was thinking at least user-space
was exported that way, kind of like Windows 3.1 on a Pentium (but double
the word sizes).

> > As for whether it's working, I just tried that document on NT and got the
> > same message, so something must have broken recently.
>
> Something weird is going on with that code...Running the x86 binary under
> the FX!32 emulator, it can read Word97 documents. However, neither program
> will read the test document in the tarball.

Could you pass any information about the compiler setup? Perhaps the
compiler is packing structs for efficiency in a way 64-bit GCC doesn't
do on Unix. Are the data type sizes under Windows NT Alpha the same as
Digital Unix (Tru64) Alpha? Again I was thinking there were some 32-bit-isms
in there that might confuse code which is so specially aimed at dissecting
individual bytes from a complex file format.

-- 
Shaw Terwilliger


This archive was generated by hypermail 1.03b2.