I am curious to hear opinions on something. The current COBOL standard has an enhancement to the STOP RUN statement. There are two new options, the ERROR phrase and the NORMAL phrase. My first thought is that the NORMAL phrase could replace the RETURN-CODE special register, which is a non-standard IBM extension, for setting register 15 and thus the return code back to the OS. An example is:
STOP RUN WITH NORMAL STATUS 16 This would set R15 to a value of 16 and then terminate the run-unit normally. Essentially the same as moving 16 to RETURN-CODE and then doing a STOP RUN. The advantage to it, other than being supported by the COBOL standard, is that the RETURN-CODE special register can be unintentionally set (usually back to zero) if you do a CALL statement after setting RETURN-CODE. My further thinking is that perhaps the ERROR phrase of STOP RUN could cause an intentional abend. STOP RUN WITH ERROR STATUS 1234 This could cause a U1234 abend (or possibly a specific user abend with the 1234 being the "reason code"), which in turn would cause the run unit to "abnormally terminate" and do whatever abend processing your shop does. Currently I believe the recommendation is to call the CEE3ABD routine (or CEE3AB2), and in the past one might call ILBOABN0. Or in the case of our shop (I don't know the history/reasoning behind this) do an intentional data exception or division by zero. Anyway it seems to me that an "official" COBOL method of doing this could be worthwhile. I don't know if other languages such as C or PL/I have something similar. All thoughts are welcome (preferably agreeing with me <grin>). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
