[Oorexx-devel] An I/O mystery on windows.

[Rick M. <obj...@gm...>]

For some time now, I've been seeing random occurrences in a problem
with linein() reading from the console.  When this happens, the first
character of the line is somehow overlayed with the character "r".
The first few times I saw this, I thought I was seeing things.  The
problem was really hard to reproduce, and I never once got it to
happen while in the debugger.   I generally chalked it up to some
wierd problem that only I was seeing because of how I was running
ooRexx.

Well, there are now two crazy people here, as Mike Cowlishaw has been
seeing the same thing in some of his programs.  I, of course, have
been unable to reproduce it all, until Mike observed that it seemed to
occur more often when there was a load on his system.

So, I instrumented the stream library looking to narrow down where the
spurious letter is coming from, started two small programs with do
forever loops to provide some background noise.  Under these
conditions, I was able to trigger the problem again.  I'm not sure I
like what I'm seeing.  All of my instrumentation is pointing to this
coming directly from the C runtime _read() function.  The return code
on the read is always a good line, but the character is coming in as
an 'r' rather than the typed character.

At this point, I'm basically stuck for a fix.  It would be a fairly
extensive rewrite to convert from using the C runtime functions to
direct Win API calls, so I really don't want to do that....and there's
no guarantee that it would even fix the problem.

Mark, have you ever heard of such a situation?

Rick