IDE's Save and Load dialogs lost

[Sheepdog]

I'm helping a neighbor's youngster get started with BBC BASIC...

We're using the 64 bit BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0, on a Win 10 box. Using SDLIDE.

Between visits from me, he somehow "broke" the IDE...

When we try to invoke "Save" or "Load", in the IDE, to save/ load the BBC BASIC code we've written, the dialog fails to appear! The good new is that at least, when we then try to close the IDE, the smaller "Do you want to save your work?" dialog appears, as normal. ("Yes" doesn't get us the dialog, but I call it "good news" because at least something is working!)

(This is an edit of to original post) Early replies suggest this is one of those weird things that no one has seen before- which is more good news! The ingenuity of 9 year olds is not to be underestimated, but the problem has gone away (so far) with a simple reinstall. (I use the "download zip/ copy files to where you want them" approach.) (He didn't mess it up on purpose... but they will "try things"!)

To be clear: We only wanted a simple, basic save/load. The one provided by the IDE to deal with the program code. (I.e. we aren't trying, say, to load a CSV file into the computer in the course of a program's execution.)

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Any ideas of what he might have done to bring this on?

Is there a way to access the dialog, so that the code currently in the IDE isn't lost when we leave so ungraciously? (I've tried the usual method for recovering a dialog which is off the edge of the screen, i.e. alt-spacebar / M. That moved the whole IDE window but didn't allow me to pull the dialog back into sight within the IDE window (if that's even why I can't see it! (^_^))

(Reinstalling the system fixed things, but I was hoping a less drastic option exists, or to find out what he did to create the problem.)

[Richard Russell]

When we try to invoke "Save" or "Load", the dialog fails to appear. At least, when we then try to close the IDE, the smaller "Do you want to save your work?" dialog appears, as normal.

So, just to be clear, we are talking about BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 running on a desktop platform (Windows, MacOS or Linux), yes? And it's SDLIDE rather than Andy Parkes's BBCEdit?

My initial reaction would be to say that what you've reported is "impossible"! Unlike BBC BASIC for Windows, or some other widget frameworks, BBCSDL's 'dialog boxes' are made using bog-standard BBC BASIC graphics (MOVE, DRAW, PLOT) that a BBC Micro programmer would recognise!

So how a dialog box could 'not appear' is a total mystery to me. I'd be interested to know what happens if you run the supplied example program dlgdemo.bbc (in the examples/general folder) because that uses exactly the same mechanism.

Is there a way to access the dialog, so that the code currently in the IDE isn't lost when we leave so ungraciously?

Well, if you're on a platform which supports the SAVE command (so not 32-bit Windows) you could open the Immediate Mode window and type SAVE "filename" to save the program currently in memory.

[Richard Russell]

Any ideas of what he might have done to bring this on?

Not really. I regularly run SDLIDE on 32-bit & 64-bit Windows, 32-bit & 64-bit Linux, 32-bit & 64-bit Raspberry Pi, and x86 & ARM MacOS - that's eight different desktop platforms - and have never experienced anything quite like it.

The only vaguely similar symptom that I can explain - but it doesn't fit your description - is what happens if you press the Alt key by mistake. At that point SDLIDE is waiting for a menu hot-key - or for you to press Alt again - and won't respond to any other input.

It doesn't help with an intermittent problem, but it's perhaps worth noting that one reason for supplying two IDEs (SDLIDE and BBCEdit) is that you can use one to debug the other (they're both BBC BASIC programs). The other reason is just to provide a choice.