Barry Merrill wrote:

<begin extract>
Is there really a reason to call a z/OS MEMORY ERROR a LEAK???  It's
an ERROR.  I know the Open Systems guys love to hide behind words that
make it NOT seem to be their error, but why us???
<end extract/>

and I strongly agree that the use of euphemisms for what are in fact
errors is undesirable.

In this case, however, the use of 'leak' instead of 'error' is a very
old practice.  The phrase 'storage leak' has been used at least since
the 1970s to characterize situations in which dynamically allocated
[usually] heap storage is incompletely freed at the end of its use, so
that the total amount of this storage available gradually diminishes,
leaks away, until processing can no longer continue or performance
deteriorates spectacularly.

Here, I think, some loss in precision would attend using a generic
term like 'storage error'  instead of the traditional one.

John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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