Beachball of death

[Timothy Miller]

Many thanks to all on this thread.

After suppressing messages, I opened the stacks in question and 
combed through their stack and bg scripts, commenting out all 
non-essential handlers. I would have done this sooner, except the 
symptoms seemed to suggest a corrupted stack or corrupted application.

After saving, restarting Rev, and non-suppressing messages, these 
stacks seemed fine. The essential features still work. I guess I'll 
just comment the handlers back in, very carefully, one at a time, 
while carefully reviewing each one for possible small errors. The 
problems will make themselves known as I go along, most likely.

These are HC --> Rev stacks. I suspect a few handlers left over from 
HC contained some minor errors, which HC ignored. They didn't 
necessarily cause error messages in Rev, either, so I didn't know 
they were there. These, in combination with a few new errors, also 
minor, apparently made Rev go insane. In HC, the same errors would 
have generated easy-to-understand error messages, at worst.

I guess the rules of the game have changed. I'm certainly going to be 
more cautious than I used to be when writing new handlers.

Maybe I'm wrong, though I never once made HC go insane with 
conventional handlers doing conventional things. The occasional 
infinite repeat loop was easily interrupted with command-period. If 
I'm wrong, please correct me.

If someone can explain how conventional handlers doing conventional 
things can make Rev go insane, and what precautions to employ in the 
future -- other than the obvious ones, please speak up. Being a 
perpetual scripting novice, I wrote my crude HC scripts by trial and 
error. They either worked or didn't or generated simple error 
messages. I'm going to have to change my ways, I suppose.

Cheers,


Tim