> -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Clark Morris > Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 9:51 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: Laugh, laugh. I thought I'd die - application > crashes are features, not bugs!
<snip> > > Before all of carry on in our smugness, I have seen a number of > applications with intentional abends and created more than one batch > process with that. In the ones I did, it was because the problem was > beyond the capability of the application to fix without human > intervention and an abend was the way to force the data problem to be > fixed. There are also a number of unreliable installation grown > applications out there. Given that we let things die for out of space > conditions, something which would baffle most Microsoft developers, I > am not as critical of the approach of not digging the grave deeper > when the user has bollixed the programming beyond redemption. Both > the assembler and the COBOL compiler have such abends. True. As I previously confessed to, I have a subroutine which abends with an S0C3 due to lack of a way to tell the caller: "You passed me garbage!". I know that a number of our applications have specific abends. But they at least put out diagnostic messages to help find the problem. And MS can get "out of space" type problems. They just don't have an architected abend for it. So they rely on the application to trap and report on the problem intelligently. VSAM on z/OS is similar. I know of one application which got into a loop because it just kept trying to add records after VSAM indicated "out of space". The application didn't look at the return code and just wasted hours of run time. I prefer an ABEND in this case. But, in the given case, I would have thought a dialog box with a message about a corrupted input file, along with the name of the file, would be significantly better than just crashing. -- John McKown Senior Systems Programmer HealthMarkets Keeping the Promise of Affordable Coverage Administrative Services Group Information Technology The information contained in this e-mail message may be privileged and/or confidential. It is for intended addressee(s) only. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, reproduction, distribution or other use of this communication is strictly prohibited and could, in certain circumstances, be a criminal offense. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender by reply and delete this message without copying or disclosing it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
