🚀 go-pugleaf

I have some questions related to the Vax/VMS Modular Programming
standard.
I am NOT a systems programmer, but nonetheless am involved in implementing
a program library which we hope will adhere to the Vax/VMS Modular 
Programming standard as defined in the doc:

	Guide to Modular Procedures (or something like that)

I am particularly interested in what the standard means as related to
a facility/library's internal procedures... the Guide makes a somewhat
unclear reference to 'being consistent' about having library modules
return signal status codes and/or (or exclusive or?) signal exceptions...
I can understand the logic of this from the point of view that it unifies
the user's interface to the library, but what about procedures internal
to the facility/library?  There are many little support routines that I
need to write to do stuff to our data structures which would be internal
(i.e., not called by a user of the library) and many of these little
routines would be more elegantly programmed as functions returning some
value other than a signal, etc.  I have grown to understand the logic
of the naming conventions for facility procedures, constants, signals,
etc., but I can't see the extension of the logic of returning status
codes from user modules to internal modules which often won't need to
return any status/signal information (the only possible errors in them
would be fortran (that's the language we are using) errors)...

I would appreciate any and all comments.  Thanks.


-- 
			Brad Banko
			Cleveland, Ohio	...!decvax!cwruecmp!ncoast!btb

"The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man."
			-- Carl Jung, 1875-1961