Re: Recursive Call


In article <dktc9l$169$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx () writes:
>
> The fellow with whom I was conversing mentioned use of the stack-trace in
> debugging; I said that this was not, in my experience, a common method
> applied to IBM-architecture mainframes. I based this on my experience as
> a mere apps-jockey; when something blows up I look for the PSW, find the
> address of the previous statement and proceed from there.
>
> This ignores - in the radical sense of 'in (not) gnosis' - what folks at
> the systems level do. Is there something akin to stack tracing done on
> Big Blue Big Iron running 'classic' (COBOL/CICS/DB2) systems?

I was curious to see answers to this, but it doesn't appear that you've
had any takers.

I've not done much debugging of mainframe systems-level code, but the
folks I've seen do it generally start with a dump, and do sometimes
manually backtrack through subroutine calls. These programs were
mostly written in assembly, and they used some variant of BAL (branch
and link) for subroutine calls, and maintained their own scratch
areas for return addresses, parameters, and so forth. So there was
no contiguous "stack" as there is on x86 and the like, but they did
sometimes trace the flow of execution back using the dump.

--
Michael Wojcik michael.wojcik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Auden often writes like Disney. Like Disney, he knows the shape of beasts --
(& incidently he, too, might have a company of artists producing his lines) --
unlike Lawrence, he does not know what shapes or motivates these beasts.
-- Dylan Thomas
.

Relevant Pages