You can initiate and control program dumps in either of two ways: by using program dump statements, or by using the OPTION task attribute.
The program dump statements that are available are the ALGOL PROGRAMDUMP statement, the COBOL74 and COBOL85 CALL SYSTEM DUMP statement, the FORTRAN77 DEBUG PROGRAMDUMP statement, and the Pascal Programdump procedure. Some languages provide other statements to dump process information, but these are language-specific features. The preceding statements call an operating system feature that is available from a variety of sources.
Alternatively, you can enable a program dump by setting certain options of the OPTION task attribute. If the FAULT option is set, then the process generates a program dump if it terminates abnormally because of an internal cause. If the DSED option is set, then the process generates a program dump if the process terminates abnormally because of an external cause. For a definition of internal and external causes, refer to Understanding Internal and External Causes later in this section.
You can also specify various dump options, which determine the types of information that are included in the program dump. These dump options can be accessed through assignments to the OPTION task attribute. In ALGOL, FORTRAN77, and Pascal, these options can also be set by parameters in a program dump statement.
If a program dump statement specifies dump options, then the dump options specified in that statement are used, and the value of the OPTION task attribute is ignored. If the program dump is caused by the DSED or FAULT option of the OPTION task attribute, or by a program dump statement that does not specify any dump options, then the dump options specified by the OPTION task attribute are used for the dump.
The possible dump options are ARRAY, BASE, CODE, DBS, FILE, LIBRARIES, PRESENTARRAYS, PRIVATELIBRARIES, TODISK, CRITICALBLOCK, and TOPRINTER. The effects of these options are explained in the discussion of the OPTION task attribute. The effects of the TODISK and TOPRINTER options are also discussed under Controlling the Program Dump Destination later in this section.
