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At 3:08 PM 11/13/96 -0600, Eric Haddock wrote:
> I can honestly say I've never heard "abend" in my whole life. If I ever
>encountered it in a manual, I'd have to go reaching for the dictionary
>probably (if I couldn't figure it out by context but even then I'd have
>doubts).
...
> Is it a term mostly used outside of America?
I've heard of ABEND, but then again, I used to do assembly programming
on IBM mainframes (yikes!). I think this is a word from their (IBM) world.
In fact, searching for it on the WWW leads to this from the page http://nmsmn.com/~cservin/jargon/a/abend.html:
ABEND
[ABnormal END] /ah'bend/, /*-bend'/ n.
Abnormal termination (of software); crash; lossage. Derives from an error
message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly by
code grinders. Usually capitalized, but may appear as `abend'. Hackers will
try to persuade you that ABEND is called `abend' because it is what system
operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day,
and hence is from the German `Abend' = `Evening'.
I doubt I'd use abend rather than abort, but then I've been on PCs for a
longish time now.
Beth Mazur
MAYA Design Group
mazur -at- maya -dot- com
