*INZSR is nice. How about INZPROC? TERMPROC?

[Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

*INZSR is actually very useful for cycle programming.  It's a useful
function -- but it seems that, like me, a lot of programmers don't do much
cycle code today.

In todays world my problem is doing initialization and cleanup functions
in a service program.  (or, any NOMAIN module, I suppose)

In about 25% of the service programs I write, each procedure starts out by
calling an "initialize_me()" subprocedure.   That's awkward to code, and I
wish I didn't have to do it.

What's worse...   there's no procedure that gets called when the service
program is ended, so I need to make sure that either things are cleaned up
on a per-procedure call, or I need to have the program which uses my
service program call a special "cleanup_me()" procedure.

I think it would be INCREDIBLY useful to have procedure's that are
automatically called when my service program is activated, and when it is
deactivated.  That would save me a lot of time coding around the problem.

There are a lot of different resources that should be cleaned up.  Open
files are the most obvious thing, but aren't the only thing.   Open stream
files, memory allocations, sockets, data queues built on-the-fly, APIs
like iconv() and GSKit which need to be initialized before use, and
cleaned up before ending are all examples of places where this is useful.

My suggestion for how this could be done would be to place an H-spec at
the top of the program that specifies which procedure to call at
activation, and which procedure to call at deactivation.  Something like
this:

      H NOMAIN  ATSTART(my_startup_proc) ATEND(my_cleanup_proc)

But, I'm not too picky about how it works... I'd just love to see
something like this because *INZSR is completely useless when writing a
service program or other NOMAIN module.  and I spend perhaps 3/4 of my
programming time writing service programs.

I see a few other people have brought this up in the *INZSR thread as
well, so I'm not alone in wanting this...