Hi there - enjoying coding for the BBC Micro again, after 20 years or more - but having a bit of trouble with the otherwise excellent Swift program. After a certain amount of time, or perhaps when a troublesome file is opened (not tracked which one down yet) swift starts complaining every time I switch edit window or try to save a file. It pops up an error box with "index out of range (n)" where n slowly increments. The code compiles and runs - there are about 8 files and not much going on - very early days so far. However this issue makes doing any editing virtually impossible and not being able to save is a bit of a pain.

Has anybody else encountered this problem and perhaps a work around?

Windows 7 64-bit by the way

Cheers,

Robin Jubber

Hi Robin,

Sorry to hear of your problems, sounds very annoying. I've never been able to test on 64 bit OS, I used to have it installed nearly 2 years back but it caused so many problems for me not working with the software I had to use for work that I abandoned it and downgraded.

That said, I'm not sure this is a 64bit issue (although it is a possibility). So the issue occurs when switching edit windows or saving. Well that's a place for me to start looking. When you say "perhaps when a troublesome file is opened" do you get any errors after opening any files ?

If it's happening after a certain amount of time is it a relatively short time ? or several hours for example.

I'll start looking at the code and see if I can spot a possible issue area or at least add in some extra debugging messages to help refine what the problem is.

Hi there - thanks for the response. I can recreate the error every time by compiling my project - at that point the error starts occurring. The amount of time swift has been running doesn't seem to matter. If I close Swift and load somebody else's project - for instance one of the sprite plotting examples from this site, everything works fine.

I've included a zip file of the fledgling project that causes the problems. I've been coding with swift for about two days so its all quite simple. Perhaps I've made a horrible assembler killing mistake somewhere.

I will try creating a copy of this project, and add files one at a time until things go wrong - might help track down the problem.

Cheers,

Robin.

That's great, re-creatable is music to my ears. I'll download your project and take a look. Cheers.

A bit more investigation seems to suggest the problem lies with the control centre. Am I right in thinking that the control centre is the only way to open project files? After some files have been created and the project is running as normal - I close it down. Then I re-open swift and try opening individual files. At some point, usually when opening a file called Strings (just some data for testing but other files will do it too), using the control centre, the crashes start happening - or when I try and compile a project where this error has occurred, even if I have subsequently reloaded swift.

Hope this helps. If it is the control centre then another way to open project files might get round it, should the problem be related somehow to Windows 7 windows manager. Dragging and dropping doesn't appear to work.

Cheers,

Robin.

Thanks for the extra investigation, no time at this moment to look at it, but hopefully tomorrow or Wednesday.

Sorry it's taken a while to get back to you about this. I've just loaded up the project and can see your issue. Basically you have created a well designed project seperated into logical modules. Swift is having an issue with that.... Other projects if large have been largely flat files or if small quite simple.

I'm working on a fix.

OK, problem hopefully fixed, it works fine with your project now. I've assembled and run it and opened files with no issues. Download available in wiki page

http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/swift

Sorry for the delay in the fix, real life getting in way etc.