MFASM, the mainframe assembler emulator for IBM High Level Assembler programs, has the following restrictions and limitations:
- E15 and E35 Assembler sort exits are not supported.
- EXEC CICS statements in assembler modules are not supported.
- The ASM2DLI interface for IMS is not supported.
- There is no interactive debugger for Assembler. It is recommended to use CTF with your Assembler applications to produce CTF (consolidated trace file) output. Note: There is an Assembler generalized trace facility (GTF) available for recording all Assembler instructions executed during a test run. This facility is turned on by the presence of the environment variable GTFFILE= and has various options for the amount of detail wanted in the trace file. Also, note that in an Enterprise Server environment the server running the Assembler modules must be stopped before the trace file can be accessed as the server will open the file for exclusive access.
- During assembly the
MFASM.EXE program will produce a
SYSLIST.WTO file containing the results of the assembly. This file is created by default and is purely for informational use. It can be deleted at any time if unwanted.
- When adding Assembler files that contain CICS statements to a project in Visual Studio, the CICS statements are not automatically detected. Choosing the "Reset source directives" project menu command also does not detect the CICS statements. To enable the EXEC CICS options for the project, open the project properties, click the Assembler tab and check EXEC CICS under Preprocessors.
