Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hello.

The only thing I can think of that might cause an abend termination would be to do something you can't do such as writing to a protected dataset or filling a dataset, but IDCAMS seems to be set up to trap such abends and turn them into CC 12, so that option won't work. The only other ...

Hello.

I'm not familiar with Rocket Git, but, with my Sysprog's hat on, that sounds like the sort of thing that I would be calling Rocket Software about to get some support for.

Many computer languages tend to have a purpose designed into them. FORTRAN is good at expressing mathematical ideas, BASIC is a beginners language (although it does, depending on the version, teach some bad habits), C is best for systems engineering, and so on.

COBOL is a language that is good at ...

Hello.

File status 92 is a bit vague; "logic error" really doesn't say too much that's helpful. I'd be looking for other messages in the job output, specifically ones prefixed with "IDC", in order to get a little more information.

Hello.

If you're performing an arithmetic operation involving the input data, check the other variables being used in the calculation in case they are bad.

Hello.

The kind of redundancy that you're looking at would best be implemented through Parallel Sysplex rather than having an idle mainframe sitting around doing nothing. If you have a mainframe, then it has costs in the form of hardware maintenance, software maintenance, software licensing and ...

Hello.

There can be multiple things that will affect program performance under these conditions.

Assuming that you have identified a number of your programs which are having problems, the first thing it could be is that the programs are poorly written from a performance point of view. This can ...

Hello.

If you're trying to transfer something with binary, packed, or floating point numbers in it, then you're going to have problems. Transfer in ASCII and those numerics will be corrupted by the EBCDIC to ASCII translation. Transfer in binary and the numbers will remain intact but the text data ...

Yes, if you use an empty file and the program you are running writes data to it, the data will get written to the once empty dataset.

Hello.

I've been on the peripheries of a migration project that used this, so I know what it's intended to do, but I've not had much experience developing for it.

The objective of the product is to provide a mainframe-like environment that is close enough to the real thing that you can download ...

Hello.

First of all, the dummy syntax is "DD DUMMY" not "DD DSN=DUMMY". Coding "DD DSN=NULLFILE" is essentially the same thing as coding "DD DUMMY", it just takes slightly longer to type!

When "DD DUMMY" is used on an input DDName, it simulates an empty file. So, if you needed to, say, create an ...

CALL passes control to another CSECT which is in the current load module and hence is already in storage. It's for calling modules that you've statically linked, i.e. you've added an INCLUDE statement in the linkage editor to bind it into the current load module.

LINK will load a separate load ...

Hello.

Most of the places where you will see "CALL" used are in invoking a statically linked module where you expect control to return to your program. If you run the assembly with "PRINT GEN" you can see that it's basically doing this:

L R15,=V(OTHERMOD)
BALR R14,R15

XCTL is used to load and ...

If the formats don't match then the results can become unpredictable. This could be an abend as a result of, say, the sign being unacceptable, or the data being magnitudes out (e.g. 100 winds up as 100,000). It only becomes a concern if your data input is not consistent. The other alternative is to ...

Hello.

Temporary datasets, those starting with "&&", do not persist beyond the current job. In the scenario described, you'd have to rerun the job from the begining as your original temporary dataset would be gone.

If it's essential that step 2 be restartable (say, it's a BMP), then you'd create a ...

Hello.

It would depend upon the format of the data that you're accepting and what exactly you are looking for. If it's just a matter of finding the first number in the string and taking that as the start of the data then something like INSPECT would do the job. If it's something more complicated ...

Hello.

I somehow think the manuals are misleading on the subject of "COND". It says that the step is bypassed if the condition is true, but in practice it would appear to be the opposite. Take a look at the IBM-supplied compiler procedures that have links specified and you will find "COND=(8,LT ...

Hello.

COBOL won't let you do arithmetic on a field formatted like that, but it will let you move it somewhere else. For example, this will work:


01 WA-DECIMAL PIC S9(7) COMP-3 VALUE 100.
01 WA-FORMATTED PIC -ZZZ,ZZ9.
01 WA-BACK-TO-DECIMAL PIC S9(7) COMP-3.
.
.
.
MOVE WA-DECIMAL TO WA ...

Yes, it will work, although it is incumbent upon you to make sure that the thing you are substringing is within the length of the current record otherwise you may well get some odd results!

Hello.

There are a couple of ways of doing it, assuming that everything is working on fixed positions.

The first is that you can split the input field into two parts, for example:

01 WA-INPUT-RECORD.
03 WA-INPUT-FIELD.
05 WA-INPUT-FIELD-START PIC X(4).
05 WA-INPUT-FIELD-END PIC X(4).
03 ...