Thank you for confirming habits handed to me at Nasty Wetmonster Bank back in the 80s and 90s :-)
I've heard arguments that eyecatchers were more important before products such as IBM's IPCS (and I'm sure there are others) brought some automation to dump reading, but I know of cases where operators found the problem with help from eyecatchers, got the 'OK' for a "work around" by phone, and had things running in a matter of minutes. Roops On Sun, 29 Jun 2025, 14:06 Tom Harper, < 000016c16a7381bc-dmarc-requ...@listserv.uga.edu> wrote: > I believe eyecatchers are a mark of a professional developer. Just to > add a little more, control block eyecatchers should have the symbol of > the control block at the start, and optionally a length if it's > variable-length. CSECTs should have a header consisting of Name(CSECT), > and assembly date and time. Of course none of this is mandatory just > good programming practices in my opinion. > > Additionally, I believe all non-program storage should be marked > non-executable (although there is currently no such support for cell > pools; I have submitted an IBM "Idea" for this some time ago). It would > be nice if IBM used this facility as well for their control blocks. > > Tom Harper > > Phoenix Software International > > Programming 65 years. > > > >
