iwm@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Moor) (05/29/86)
I am trying to produce a symbiont to interface to various machines over our LAN - an IBM, Unix etc talking various protocols. In all cases I have programs already running that do the work of the transfer (kermit etc). The problem is debugging the symbiont - written in Pascal. Symbionts run with all of SYS$INPUT, SYS$OUTPUT, SYS$ERROR and SYS$COMMAND directed to JOB_CONTROL, when my symbiont crashes it sends a backtrace to SYS$ERROR, JOB_COTROL reports the 'unexpected message' BUT DOESNT SAY WHAT IT IS! and the crashes when it gets an EOF from the symbiont. I have to restart all of the queues, and once lost the queue file. I have tried catching the error using an exception handler, which works sometimes, but would like to know how to redirect the error messages reliably. Does anybody have a test harness for symbionts (which is more reliable than JOB_CONTROL!). --- Well at least the interface is documented in VMS 4.