Binder REP Cards Was: What's the linkage editor really wants 3294

Whatever it was, it wasn't important. My buttembler did everything I needed in a production environment. I wrote a successor when I moved to an OS-3 environment; the macro processor was a unpleasant woman, but I finally got it to the point where I could even do sysgens with it.

What I liked was what my buttembler could do that the manufacturer's couldn't. Like providing a decent cross-reference listing, or issuing warnings for questionable code which the manufacturer's buttembler accepted, e.g. if a value was supplied on a DS (define storage) statement. I added the latter after spending several hours trying to track down a typo which should have been easily detected. Consider the following:

IOAREA DS CL80'INITIAL VALUE'

This allocates 80 bytes of memory, but the initial value is ignored because DS allocates uninitialized storage. The correct statement should have defined a constant initializer as follows:

IOAREA DC CL80'INITIAL VALUE'

Here's another example:

STRING DC CL16'THIS CONSTANT IS TOO LONG'

The manufacturer's buttembler issued no warning, just quietly truncated the string to 16 bytes. My buttembler made sure you knew about this potential problem.

Just those REP cards in the JCL. Each card specified a memory address and the data to be inserted, and the patches would be applied between the time the program loaded and the time it started executing.

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