[comp.lang.modula2] Waterloo Modula-2 error message, et al.

TRG@WATDCS.UWATERLOO.CA (Trevor Grove) (05/03/91)

On "Thu, 2 May 91 02:31:33 GMT", "Dave Mueller
   <ndsuvm1!bj020000@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>" said:

> Does anyone know where I can get a good list of all/most of the Waterloo
> Modula-2 run-time error messages and what they mean??

We don't publish a list of error-messages, since they are intended to
be self-explanatory.  If you have a particular message that is causing
problems, let me know and I will help you to sort it out (private
communication would be best for this, I think).

> Also, does anyone know how to execute CP/CMS commands that return data, and
> trap this data in a string (Like  q disk a) ...  I'd like to do this in
> Modula-2 so I can make a MODULE out of this program..

This is a good-news/bad-news answer. The good news is that for CP
commands, you can use the "diag" function to do a diag8 call, and
get back the output. There are examples of this in the Library
User's Guide.

The bad news is that for CMS commands (or commands that you can't
or don't want to classify yourself), there is no standard way to
retrieve command output.  You can use the "system" function to
execute the command, but output retrieval depends on the facilities
provided by the command itself.  Some might support a "stack" option
(which you could then read back via the console stack), but in general
there is no way to get the output.

Trevor Grove
Computer Systems Group
University of Waterloo
trg@watdcs.uwaterloo.ca  -or- trg@watcsg.uwaterloo.ca -or -
trg@csg.uwaterloo.ca     -or- TRG at WATCSG  (BITNet)