topic Re: Difference in Itanium and Alpha Basic error handling in Operating System - OpenVMS

Difference in Itanium and Alpha Basic error handling

Jonathan Cronin — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:18:47 GMT

! This program fails (signals an error) on Itanium
! and exits cleanly on Alpha
! Both OPenVMS 8.3, Basic v1.6

call inner

end

function long inner

option handle=severe

%include "$SSDEF" %from %library "SYS$SHARE:BASIC$STARLET"

when error in
call lib$signal( SS$_ABORT by value )
exit function 1
use
exit handler unless vmsstatus = SS$_ABORT
print "Caught abort: "; vmsstatus
end when

end function 0

Re: Difference in Itanium and Alpha Basic error handling

Hein van den Heuvel — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 18:49:37 GMT

Nice concise reproducer. Thanks.
Looks like a bug. Report to HP.

The program may be right, but it feels wrong to me. It declares a function 'inner' and then calls it as a function, with no return value. That may be legit but I don't like it myself, and the compiler agrees...
If you change the code to i%=inner it works on both platforms.

Then again... if you change the code to 'sub inner'... 'exit sub' and 'return sub' the problem stays. So something is wrong and worth reporting officially.

fwiw,
Hein.

Re: Difference in Itanium and Alpha Basic error handling

Jonathan Cronin — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:22:48 GMT

Interesting. I was going to claim that the bug had occured with a function call (like sts = inner ) since we "deprecate" the use of call, but went back to the code before I distilled it down, and the original usage was a "call" generated by an automated test-wrapper.

I expect there's a lot of code out there that "call"s functions.