turboc/msc spawn*

[Earl H. Kinmonth]

In article <6685 at sigi.Colorado.EDU> swarbric at tramp.Colorado.EDU (Frank Swarbrick) writes:
>I have a better question...  How does one go about reporting bugs to software
>companies?  I have found four or five bugs in Turbo C 1.5, and I would like to
>tell them, but if I send them a letter telling them of them will they actually
>listen?

You can write Borland.  I did once, and they even replied --- six
weeks later.  However, when I say "replied," I mean that I got mail
back from them, not answers to the questions I had raised
(primarily mistakes in the documentation claims about routines
being the same as in UNIX).  They also promised a coupon for $15
worth of time on CompuServe.  It was to come under separate
cover.  A year later, I am still waiting. -:)

On a related note -- I find it interesting that computer
magazines such as PC Journal, Byte, etc. have made no mention of
bugs in QC or TC in any of the reviews I've seen.  Perhaps this
has to do with using only benchmark programs that do nothing to
test the system calls.  Or perhaps it has to do with the
advertising pages these companies buy.

The ability to compile and rapidly execute contrived benchmarks
has nothing to do with real programming.  I'd happily settle for
slower execution if that went with greater freedom from bugs.
Two or three seconds saved in execution cannot repay me for two
or three days spent programming around bugs or testing badly
documented routines to find out how they really work.

It seems to me that there ought to be a benchmark based on some
large, complex program that really talks to the operating system
and video io.  The performance criteria would then be the number
of patches needed for any one compiler and the number of person
hours (months) required to recompile the benchmark and get it to
execute successfully.

E H. Kinmonth Hist. Dept.  Univ. of Ca., Davis Davis, Ca. 95616
916-752-1636/0776

Disclaimer:  This is AmeriKa!  Who needs a disclaimer!

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