For a long time now I had this wish, to give "Step Across" a code-review, but many things kept me from getting "into it". My intention was to take the conversion engine from its original assembler core to c-language.
The 1.20 version you are holding now, is the result of a 2 day code brushing.
Not having looked at the code for over one year did the most effect of it. All the "twists" jumped to my eyes like red spots. So the code looks much straighter now.
Most important, I could fix a "long standing bug", which would crash the program every now and then (when converting)!!! This memory bug would become a real nightmare since system 7.5.3. It actually was a pointer derived from a Handle before locking it. You might take from this, that with every new release the mac system software takes more and more advantage of moving data in the heap...
(So, this is one reason for system 7.5.3 to put up error 11:
Bad pointer management now going pesky.)
After doing this (nice experience) there was somehow no time left to attack the intended work: going over the assembler engine (more to the point: it turned out to be much more work, as I had figured out). So I left this as was.
This means: Watch out, to use "Step Across" with Speed Doubler on a PPC-machine,
it will be kind of slow without.
Besides, I changed some of the handling:
- You can now switch the extern system-you convert from or to-from the menu.
No need to open the dialog box, if you only want to switch systems.
The choosen extern system is checked in the menu.
More to the point you can use the keyboard (cmd1 - cmd7) to do it.
The antagonist system will not only be checked in the menu
but also be displayed as the rightmost menu title.
So no need no more to go into nothing, just type until you get it right.
- Cleaning up also meant a changing in the file handling. If you convert without
adding an extension, so that the target filename is the source filename, now there
is an intermediate file written, which is later given the original’s filename after
the original file has been fully converted and then deleted.
(Earlier versions tried to do it on one file, which of course was only possible
with files small enough to fit into memory in one stake.)
I only tell this to keep it in mind, when you convert big files in small areas.
The free diskspace needed is the same as the biggest file converted.
On the other hand, you can now really use the "on the spot"-conversion for every
file(size) there is.
(I suppose, that "Step Across" users know, that the program slices up big files,
and thus puts no limit to the size of the files to be converted...)
You should now take a look into the normal ReadMe,
to learn about what is done in the settings and that you should set them once before using the drag-drop mechanism.
