Guardian Programmer's Guide

Introduction to Guardian Programming
Guardian Programmer’s Guide — 421922-014
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Time Management
For both TNS/R native processes and TNS processes, if you need more space than
what is available in the data areas normally provided by the system, you must use
extended data segments. There are two types of extended data segments: Flat
segments, which can provide up to 128 megabytes of extra storage, and selectable
segments, which can provide up to 127.5 megabytes of extra storage.
Memory pools provide a simple and efficient way to manage extended data segments.
Memory pools can also be used to manage data in the user data segment.
Section 17, Managing Memory, describes memory management, including how to
manage the user data segment, how to manage extended data segments, and how to
use memory pools.
Time Management
The operating system provides time management in the sense of timekeeping and
interval timing. “Timekeeping” means keeping track of the time of day in each CPU.
“Interval timing” means the ability to control when actions occur or to report on how
long an activity has been in progress. For example, you can set timeout values for
certain operations or find out how long a process has been executing.
Section 18, Managing Time, describes the programmatic interface to the timing
features of the operating system.
Data Manipulation
The operating system provides several features that enable you to manipulate data.
These features include:
•
Procedures that convert numeric data between binary values and the ASCII strings
that represent them.
•
A formatter that formats output data and converts input data from external to
internal form.
•
Support for multibyte character sets, enabling applications to support character
sets that require more characters than are provided by standard ASCII code.
Section 19, Formatting and Manipulating Character Data, provides information about
the programmatic interface to the data-manipulation features of the operating system.
Debugging, Trap Handling, and Signal Handling
The system provides tools for debugging object code: the Inspect, Visual Inspect,
Native Inspect (on TNS/E systems) and Debug debuggers. The Inspect program is a
high-level symbolic debugger. Debug is a low-level debugger, providing information at
the machine-code level. Visual Inspect is a NonStop operating system symbolic
debugger that uses program visualization, direct manipulation, and other techniques to
improve productivity in the development or production environment. Native Inspect is a