I got the following error when I was trying to use coldcc to compile the SmallCore textdump:
$ ./coldcc -c [ 8 May 2019 13:20:42] Compiling database... [ 8 May 2019 13:20:42] Reading from "textdump". Line 1256: ERROR: Text dump ended inside method definition! [ 8 May 2019 13:20:42] Syncing binarydb... [ 8 May 2019 13:20:42] Syncing lookup name cache... [ 8 May 2019 13:20:42] Syncing lookup name cache... object root($1) still active! [ 8 May 2019 13:20:42] Done $
Here, "Line 1256" is the end of the file and the root object is the first object in the textdump - during testing, this would always change to whatever first object I had in the textdump.
I tried a few different things: I counted the brackets and quotes and parenthesis to see if there was anything that was out of balance but everything was fine; I pulled out portions of the textdump, deleting the other lines, and still got the same error. Finally, after rewriting some of the code, I finally figured out the problem: I'm running on a Linux server and found that the core file was in a "DOS format" having a DOS return character at the end of every line (using "cat -t textdump", they look like ^M characters). I used dos2unix on the textdump and everything finally compiled as expected.