Every reference entry names a source, and every source is linked on its page so you can go check it yourself. Where possible that source is official vendor documentation or support content, IBM Support and IBM Documentation pages in particular, but a real share of entries, especially for less centrally documented platforms like PowerBuilder, HLASM, and ColdFusion, are sourced from practitioner forums, vendor community boards, and technical blogs instead, because that is where the working knowledge for those platforms actually lives. We do not scrape or rewrite competitor content, and we do not fabricate a code, a citation, or a quote: where a claim could not be verified against something real, it was dropped rather than guessed at.
Entries are marked verified once their source resolves to a hostname on an explicit allowlist of official vendor domains (IBM, Micro Focus, OpenText, Rocket Software, GNU/GnuCOBOL, Appeon, Embarcadero, and Adobe’s own documentation subdomains, specifically). Everything sourced from a forum, blog, or community site is labeled pending source verification instead, right on the page, rather than being folded into the same status.
That check runs against the exact hostname of each entry’s citation, not a hand-set flag, so it can’t drift out of sync with what the link actually points to. It’s also deliberately an allowlist of specific hosts rather than a whole domain: several vendors host both real documentation and a public user forum on the same root domain, and a forum post shouldn’t count as vendor-verified just because it happens to share a domain with the vendor’s real docs.
278 of 466 entries (60%) currently resolve to an official vendor domain. The rest are real, cited, and were independently spot-checked against their source during research, just not from a domain this site treats as vendor-official.
Because the same status or abend code can mean different things depending on the compiler or platform, every entry names which compiler or platform it applies to. Where behavior differs across vendors, we say so directly on the page instead of averaging it into one vague answer. Each language also gets the categories of reference content that are actually real for its ecosystem, not a forced identical template: COBOL’s file-status/abend/CICS/DB2-SQLCODE split doesn’t map onto RPG’s %STATUS codes and DB2-for-i SQLCODEs, or onto Delphi’s VCL exception classes and database error codes, and we don’t pretend it does.
| Language | Entries | Categories |
|---|---|---|
| COBOL | 73 | 4 |
| RPG (IBM i / AS/400) | 72 | 4 |
| PL/I | 70 | 3 |
| Assembly / HLASM | 47 | 2 |
| PowerBuilder | 37 | 3 |
| Delphi / Object Pascal | 75 | 2 |
| ColdFusion | 38 | 3 |
| Fortran | 54 | 3 |
Every interactive tool runs entirely in your browser against the same reference database described above; nothing you type into a tool is transmitted anywhere, and none of them call an external AI model, no matter what a tool’s name might imply, the copy on each tool page says plainly what it actually does under the hood.
Blog posts cite real, fetched sources for every statistic and quotation, credited to the original poster or publication. Vendor listings describe publicly known market positioning, ownership, and product approach, each checked against the source linked on that vendor’s page; this is a market overview, not a paid placement or an affiliate list, and no vendor pays for inclusion or better placement.
We re-check reference content on a quarterly basis for each language, since compiler versions and documentation do change. Found something wrong? The fastest way to get it fixed is to say so directly.
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