RE: Did anybody ever use halt indicators?

That brought back memories, Buck - both good and traumatic.

I hated Halt indicators. I did use one once - never again. They were
shortcuts for programmers that did not know how to handle errors cleanly or
were just too lazy.

Part of the problem, as I remembered it, is that if you turned on, say, H1
in one cycle it did not rear its head until the beginning of the next
detailed part of the cycle. Maybe RPG IV is different so I wrote a very
simple program to find out.
It only turned on H1 and LR and, then returned. My expectation was that I
would never get a notification. I was wrong; I got an "unhandled
application error". I looked at the detailed cycle logic flowchart (link
below) and found that Halt indicators are checked on Last Record.

So in a real program without a primary file, the program just falls over.
Maybe someone else has a way to cleanly handle that situation - but frankly
I don't see the advantage. I still have to maintain some RPG II programs
with them and, when they rear their ugly head(s), I pull out another clump
of gray hairs. And then fix the program.

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_74/rzasd/pgmcycdtl.htm

Jerry C. Adams
I'm self-employed. I'M not talking to myself; I'm in a staff meeting.
IBM i Programmer/Analyst
--
NMM&D
615-832-2730

-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Buck Calabro
Sent: Friday, December 04, 2020 6:37 PM
To: RPG programming on IBM i
Subject: Re: Did anybody ever use halt indicators?

From: RPG400-L <rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of John

Yeung

Sent: Friday, December 4, 2020 1:14 PM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
<rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Did anybody ever use halt indicators?

I've never seen them in the wild, and have never heard anyone talk about
them, even old-timers who reminisce about match field indicators and share
war stories about RPG II.

To me, halt indicators seem like a light-weight, bare-bones exception
mechanism.

Were they unpopular because they were TOO bare-bones? What's the story on
halt indicators?

John Y.

Why, I used H1 just a few minutes ago...
https://imgur.com/t13aSNA

--buck