Easy to reproduce. Create an assembler input deck with a line longer than 80
bytes; it can even be a single line:
*
x
(that x is in column 81)
Put it in a USS directory as, say, bad.asm. Now cd to that directory in a shell
and issue:
as ./bad.asm
You'll get this lovely error:
as ./bad.asm
** ASMA999U Assembly terminated - SYNAD Exit taken - Permanent I/O error on
SYS00011 data set
,PHS3 ,*OMVSEX ,OMVS,*,SYS00011,GET ,WRONG LEN
RECRD,00000000000000,QSAM S
,***,*******,0000000001,0008002C, ,**,
FSUM3401 The assemble step ended with rc = 20.
Really? That's somebody's idea of a coherent error? After much tinkering, it
turns out that WRONG LEN RECRD means "I found a record too long" (was there a
shortage of capital Os that day?), and in
,***,*******,0000000001,0008002C, ,**,
the 0000000001 is the offending record number.
Needless to say, we did not find this on record 0000000001 of a bogus assembler
file. Instead, we found it on record n of an included macro, which took far
longer to track down. And yes, the number shown in that case is the record
number *of the included macro*, whose name appears nowhere in the error. So the
error isn't even correct in that case, as it appears to be saying that record n
of the input file is wrong, when it's actually record n of the included macro,
which of course could be many layers deep.
Errors, kids, should be illuminating. In this case, it knew everything it
needed to: the offending macro name, the offending record number, and what was
wrong with it. It could have just said that, but no, it had to be obscure.
I'll admit that this is no worse than a lot of z/OS errors. That's no excuse;
this isn't 1964.
...phsiii (grumpy after wasting time on this)
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