Guillermo, I too was taught (more by life than formal education) that things should clearly succeed or fail, but that's not what is happening here, unless I am missing something really obvious. Thanks! Bill ________________________________________ From: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Guillermo Polito [guillermopolito@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 9:38 PM To: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Another silent failure? On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K <bschwab@anest.ufl.edu<mailto:bschwab@anest.ufl.edu>> wrote: I am playing with a new library and for kicks thought I would call its get-version function: | buffer | buffer := String new:80. PLplotLibrary default cPlgver:buffer. buffer. The above appears to do nothing; the buffer remains blank, and there is no error raised from it. I tried something more complicated involving external address and #alloc: and got the version number. That is encouraging from a perspective of talking to the library, but then I had to square the above failure with my use of memcpy() not long ago (different topic). In that case, I had real need to allocate a buffer in a fixed heap, but was told that I could ultimately copy from said buffer (which lives across multiple gcs and would move) into a ByteArray of the needed size, which would not move during the memcpy() call. That worked. So I tried | buffer | buffer := ByteArray new:80. PLplotLibrary default cPlgver:buffer. buffer asString. and get the version number. What's up? Why is it ok to pass a byte array but not a string? If there really is a difference, there should be an exception hinting that something is wrong and what it might be - right? I was taught that when objects can't answer a message the right way, they should raise an exception :). BTW, I don't know the difference between ByteArray and String... so I have to do some research :) Bill _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr<mailto:Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr> http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project