I “helped” someone with an EasyC problem just now. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t much help, since I was able to determine only that the file which should contain the project code, the .BDS file, was instead filled with only nulls. Zeros.
I’m not a regular user of EasyC, so I don’t know whether this is a known problem. A quick search of this forum and google’s view of the universe at large didn’t turn up anything.
So the questions: Has this happened to you? Do you know why it happened? Do you know how to prevent it?
It’s a binary file not text so if you were to open it with a text editor it would show up full of nulls and various other obscure characters. The only files you can edit is the Ctrl.dat and any .h files.
EasyC relies heavily on their graphic model so while it has a bunch of wizards and helpers for creating generic functions, the code isn’t very “shareable”. That’s the advantage of the other compilers.
Yes, I’m aware it’s a binary file. I know you can’t know this, but converting unsual data formats is one of the things I do professionally.
After a quick look with some format discovery tools I’ve built, I was surprised to see the report that the file contained no non-zero bytes. Believing that maybe I had broken my toolset (it happens) I used a standard Unix/Linux/MacOS command line utility (hexdump; info about it here: hexdump man page ) to get a different look inside the file. Here’s what I saw:
The first line is the command line prompt and the command I typed. (hexdump -C filename)
The following lines give the output of the command.
Which, if you know how to read them, say the file is filled with 0x262e (9774 decimal) bytes of zeros.
I wasn’t attempting to edit the .BDS file, but rather to determine why the original poster couldn’t open his EasyC project. I’ve done that. OP couldn’t open the project becasue the BDS file contains only nulls.
Now, I’m trying to determine whether this is a common problem, what might have caused it, and whether it’s preventable. It doesn’t seem to be common, or more people would be complaining about it. But that’s just a guess, and lots of people are off at competitions today.