Re: MI Module

>Date: Thu, 15 Jun 00 10:12:12 CDT
>From: bvining@vnet.ibm.com
>
>I'm not sure that the ILE RPG and ILE COBOL manuals really talk about
>how to access MI either (at least a scan for 'machine' and 'mi' didn't
>bring up anything that looked pertinent at a glance),

COBOL and RPG refer to these as "system functions" or "system built-ins".
In COBOL, you have to code
  LINKAGE SYS FOR "name"
in the SPECIAL NAMES section to tell the compiler that the function
is an MI builtin.  C also needs to be told about MI builtins through
#pragma linkage(name,builtin).  RPG doesn't need anything special; it
guesses that a function is an MI builtin if it starts with CEE or
underscore.  I think CL works the same way.

>Now CL is not what I would consider the most flexible language for MI
>access.  The lack of pointer support definitely makes access to alot
>of the various instructions difficult (if not impossible without
>introducing some other language to construct the pointers) but then CL
>has lots of considerations (file update, etc.) that have been pointed
>out over the years.  But the basic support for MI access is there.

Another problem with CL and MI (that's impossible to solve, not just
difficult) is that CL doesn't support passing parameters by value,
which many functions require.

Barbara Morris


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