----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Klein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 8:57 AM
Subject: Fw: Another OS/390 to z/OS 1.4 migration question (COBOL)
Sorry to disagree on this one (again), but the error message tells you
exactly WHERE (what line and what column in that line) has the problem. a
VERY simple search of either the COBOL LRM or APG for the term "shift-in"
will tell you what this means and again, a search of the manual SHOULD
take
you to:
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/igy3c120/2.18
which should show you where your "customization" went wrong.
You state,
"IBM message is supposed to have a response documented, like this: ..."
Where did you get this idea? Some products certainly do that, but
certainly
NOT all (and it isn't just the COBOL compiler that doesn't).
I got this idea from the IBM pubs coordinator. The stated IBM direction and
standard for error messages is that every error message is documented in a
manual with a programmer response field. Remember when ISPF didn't document
any of its messages, and it was damn near impossible to figure out exactly
what needed to be fixed? It took many years, but we finally got ISPF
development to create a messages manual with response fields for each
message. It's not enough to point out the error, you have to tell the user
how to fix it. This philosophy is even more critical nowadays where many of
us no longer have the time to be experts on every product we support. The
typical system programmer is now called on to support potentially hundreds
of products. There is absolutely no way to know the solution for every
problem without being told specifically or at least given a list of
possibilities. On top of that, the time lost debugging a problem is more
expensive than ever. In this case, we lost a day waiting for the solution
from IBM. If a messages manual had provided a programmer response field as
I indicated earlier, we could have solved the problem in about 5 minutes.
Even in your scenario, the problem would have taken probably 15-30 minutes
to research all the manuals and cross-reference the information, and even
then you're not sure of your solution because you had to piece it together
yourself. If this still doesn't make sense to you, I give up.
Regards,
Tom Conley
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