Course Description

Enterprise PL/I Debugging and Maintenance

This course: course objectives; course outline;
Language Environment; PL/I; Debugging; Topic list; Course list; Home page

Benefits

The student will learn to approach debugging systematically, using the appropriate features of the PL/I language to facilitate debugging. In addition, he or she will learn to interpret the various forms of debugging output from PL/I, including CEEDUMPS.

Audience

PL/I programmers who need to debug PL/I programs, understand the PL/I run-time environment, or tune PL/I programs for performance.

Prerequisites

The student should have experience coding PL/I programs, be comfortable with the text editor you use, and be able to code JCL to run simple batch jobs.

Related IBM Materials

Enterprise PL/I Programming Guide

Enterprise PL/I Language Reference

• General debugging strategy
• Debugging techniques
• How and where does PL/I store variables
• Storage classes - static, automatic, controlled and based storage
• DSAs and Heaps
• Compiler inputs and outputs
• Compile and execution time parameters
• Subroutines, arguments, and parameters
• Locators / descriptors
• Dummy arguments
• ON ERROR
• Pointer debugging
• PLIDUMP and CEE3DMP
• Conditions
• PL/I and dumps
• Command abends
• Finding where your program stopped
• Finding data in a dump
• Good coding techniques
• Performance considerations

Exercises

There are two machine exercises.