Re: Recursive Call

In article <dl2hl00kku@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Michael Wojcik <mwojcik@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>In article <dktc9l$169$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx () writes:

[snip]

>> 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.

Oh, that's only because I add nothing but noise to the newsgroup... and
the questions I ask are so *hard*, too!

>
>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.

That's what I recall from what I learned of Assembley code, aye... you
always started out with a BALR, a USING and somewhere near the top there'd
be something like ST R14,SAVEAREA to stash away the return address... but
nothing physically built into the system that one would call a 'stack'.

Thanks much.

DD

.

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