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From: LDW@USCMVSA.BITNET (Leonard D Woren)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370
Subject: Re: Writing to the console in MVS systems
Message-ID: <9103090651.AA07615@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 9 Mar 91 06:50:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: IBM 370 Assembly Programming Discussion List
              <ASM370@OHSTVMA.BITNET>
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Organization: The Internet
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On Mon, 4 Mar 91 23:27:00 CST,
   Michael Stack <A01MES1@NIU.BITNET> said:
>...
> My circumvention is to keep some WTO MF=L boiler-plate handy.  It doesn't
> follow good programming practice in that there is no macro expansion,
> but my excuse is that there are far too many WTOs in the universe for
> IBM to alter the basic format.  I shun MCSFLAGS and their ilk, and so
> avoid some of the potential difficulties.

There's no perfectly legal way of doing this, but there is a way that
still uses the macro expansion to do some of the work.  Code

WTO1   WTO  ' ',MF=L,whatever_other_operands_you_need
WTO1L  EQU  *-WTO1

Now you still have to account somewhat for the format of the
expansion (remember PRINT GEN!).  Use code like this:

       MVC  WTOAREA+2(2),WTO1+2    copy flag bytes
       MVC  WTOAREA+4(???),message_text   could be an EXecuted MVC
       LA   R15,4+length_of_message_text
       STH  R15,WTOAREA+4
       LA   R15,WTOAREA(R15)       -> message text
       MVC  0(WTO1L-4-1),WTO1+4+1  copy other stuff like MCSFLAG

This may be ugly, but it's much preferable to hand expanding ROUTCDE,
DESC, MCSFLAG, etc.

/Leonard