Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 09:47:35 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Michael Dossis <Michael DOT Dossis AT comlab DOT oxford DOT ac DOT uk>
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu, gnat-report AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu
Subject: Re: GNAT-ADA-DOS bugs?


On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, Michael Dossis wrote:

> When I run the produced executables, they either crass the machine
> (this is the case of e.g. the hello.exe) or they are reported
> as "TOO BIG" to be loaded in the memory (how strange, with their
> size of been less than 150 Kbytes, and with other applications,
> including my own written software of about 300-400 Kbytes running
> OK on the same system!!!).

Are you maybe trying to run the COFF executables produced by the linking 
stage, with no .EXE suffix?  If so, then you should either run them with 
go32, like this:

	go32 yourprog args ...

or make an EXE-style file from it with this command:

	coff2exe yourprog

which will produce `yourprog.exe' which you can run from the DOS prompt, 
like any other program.

(COFF executables cannot be run by DOS, because they don't have the
standard program header which tells DOS what is the size of the program, 
where to put the program segments, etc.  I guess (if this is your case) 
DOS blindly tries to interpret the beginning of the COFF file as the EXE 
header, which sometimes crashes your machine, sometimes makes DOS think 
the program needs too much memory, and might do other ``interesting'' 
things.)