19 Nov
2018
19 Nov
'18
4:24 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great jim stephens via cctalk once stated:
IFBR14 if you all are not familiar with MVS / MVT batch programming is a
program which immediately terminates w/o any return codes by doing an
assembly language return to the caller of the job step via the contents
of R14 of the processor, which is also the return address.
I've always been amused by IEFBR14 ever since I heard about it. I first
came across it by this quote:
Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least
one instruction---from which, by induction, one can deduce that
every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work.
IEFBR14 was this program---one instruction long, and it contained a bug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEFBR14
-spc (The fix doubled the size of the program---such bloat!)