btb@ncoast.UUCP.UUCP (03/26/87)
I have some questions related to the Vax/VMS Modular Programming standard. I am NOT a systems programmer, but nonetheless am involved in implementing a program library which we hope will adhere to the Vax/VMS Modular Programming standard as defined in the doc: Guide to Modular Procedures (or something like that) I am particularly interested in what the standard means as related to a facility/library's internal procedures... the Guide makes a somewhat unclear reference to 'being consistent' about having library modules return signal status codes and/or (or exclusive or?) signal exceptions... I can understand the logic of this from the point of view that it unifies the user's interface to the library, but what about procedures internal to the facility/library? There are many little support routines that I need to write to do stuff to our data structures which would be internal (i.e., not called by a user of the library) and many of these little routines would be more elegantly programmed as functions returning some value other than a signal, etc. I have grown to understand the logic of the naming conventions for facility procedures, constants, signals, etc., but I can't see the extension of the logic of returning status codes from user modules to internal modules which often won't need to return any status/signal information (the only possible errors in them would be fortran (that's the language we are using) errors)... I would appreciate any and all comments. Thanks. -- Brad Banko Cleveland, Ohio ...!decvax!cwruecmp!ncoast!btb "The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man." -- Carl Jung, 1875-1961