Introduction to Symbolic Support › What is Symbolic Support?

What is Symbolic Support?

The term symbolic support refers to the use of source code information from application programs to enhance and simplify the use of CA Application Quality and Testing Tools products for z/OS.

Some of these products include:

• CA InterTest Batch
• CA InterTest for CICS
• CA Optimizer/II
• CA SymDump Batch
• CA SymDump for CICS

These products provide application programmers with the critical tools needed to improve productivity throughout the application life cycle. Symbolic support makes these products easier to learn and use by speaking to programmers using terms that they recognize and understand from their own source code.

For example, using symbolic support with an interactive debugger like CA InterTest Batch lets programmers do the following:

• Enter breakpoint commands right on the source listing display.
• Stop execution at every label in a program.
• Automatically display the values of referenced variables at each statement.
• Easily display the value of any program variable.
• Set conditional breakpoints based on variable values.
• View a trace of all previously executed source statements.

Symbolic support eliminates the need to manually locate variables in storage, compute program offsets for source statements, or determine which statements were executing. You do not need to keep program listings open while debugging. All of this is done for you automatically when you use symbolic support with the CA Application Quality and Testing Tools products for z/OS.