Hunkeler, Peter wrote: >>WTO is a lazy way to write something without all those OPEN/WRITE/PUT/CLOSE >>macros. ;-) Did you see my smiley? ;-)
Really, when I write a brand new program, I sometimes use WTO for debugging purposes during development, say for example, to see whether a branch or program stub has been reached. When confirmed, I just comment it out and move on to the next part. >WTO / WTOR is the means to communicate with the operator, either human or >automated. The system provides that communication path. It does not need an >setup on the program / JCL side. It should not be misused as cheap replacement >for a "real" application log written to a dataset. Lots and lots of WTOs from one job are frowned upon. (IEA653I, IEA654A, etc.) We recommend our programmers and our users programmers to use WTOs sparingly, but rather write messages, progress indicators, etc on output as defined in DD. We allow temporary debug messages to be shown on SYSLOG via WTO as long it is used sparingly. >If you really need some log information to appear in the jobs JESYSMSG log, >use WTL. It will not disturb neither operators or automation. Agreed. >If you care to write a proper program documenting the actions done, don't shy >away from OPEN/WRITE/CLOSE. IMHO, this is part of good programming style. Indeed. See my comments above. I sometimes have more than one DD output per program (Assembler/COBOL/REXX). Say, one output for normal messages, another for progress indicators and third for unexpected things. Of course, YMMV and users have their own queer requests. ;-) History trivia: Years ago, when the tape apes were mounting tape reels and later cartridges, the production jobs showed WTOR like this: '<JOB name> MOUNT <volser>'. Or 'INSERT <volser>' or 'EJECT <volser>' for cartridge robots. They then replied when the tapes were moved from the vault and are ready for mounts. Now with VTS, etc, these days, such messages are very rare these days. Groete / Greetings Elardus Engelbrecht ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
