System/34: Encyclopedia II - System/34 - ALIGNMENT

System/34 - ALIGNMENT

The expensive check forms must be perfectly aligned or all of the numbers won't fit in the little boxes, which is tragic. Therefore, an alignment can be performed using the PRINTER OCL statement:

// PRINTER NAME-PAYCHECK, FORMS-BUXX, DEVICE-P1,ALIGN-YES

The subconsole will now get this message when ready to print checks:

SYS-5825 OPTIONS (012 ) ALIGN THE FORMS IN PRINTER P1

By replying this message AFTER aligning the forms, the operator could be sure that the check information didn't print until the forms were properly aligned.

JOBS AND JOB QUEUES

What is a job?

In S/34 parlance, a job is any task the computer has been asked to do. A job has a job number, which for a program is the Workstation ID plus the time in HHMMSS format. For a printout, there's a spool job, which is "SP" and a four-digit suffix which is incremented by 1.

So what's a job queue?

Sometimes a needed report should be run in the background so as not to delay the users. If the parameters of the report are defined, it shouldn't occupy the user's time or occupy that oh-so-valuable acreage on the CRT. For this reason, the Job Queue was invented. Imagine your program standing in line waiting to use the computer processor. A job queue has a size (the number of jobs that can be in line) and a value for concurrency (how many job queue jobs that can run at the same time.)

JOBQ OCL

The JOBQ OCL statement causes the job queue job to be initialized, but it won't begin immediately if there's a lineup. This allows some greater control of system resources.

EVOKE OCL

The EVOKE OCL statement also causes the job to run in the background, but EVOKE causes the called module to start immediately as a new job, while the procedure that EVOKEd the called module continues to run. There is no delay as there can be when JOBQ is called.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "ALIGNMENT", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki