I too was surprised at "no conditional GETMAINs". No conditional FREEMAINs I can understand.
As to "expectations", when you're talking about what can be conveyed with 8 characters (4 for COND, 1 for equal, 3 for YES), or for just about anything else, you really should not "expect" much other than that things will behave as documented. You made an assumption. Was it an unreasonable assumption? No. But it was an assumption nevertheless. And it happened not to be a correct one. There's always room for documentation improvement. As I said, COND=YES means for the most part, return code instead of abend when "no storage available". If that is not clear in the doc, it should be made so. No one would choose document all the specific reasons that could be other than "no storage available". We're talking about the STORAGE macro (since GETMAIN does not have a COND keyword, only a COND indicator, such as the "C" in "RC"). Please re-read the documentation and comment on problems with that documentation, not making assumptions that there is no such documentation about the behavior of COND=YES. Peter Relson z/OS Core Technology Design ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN