1 Introduction

The Starlink MESSGEN facility is a system devised and written by Brian McIlwrath to enable error messages to be associated with Starlink STATUS values on UNIX systems. This feature is available with the VAX/VMS error system and has proved useful.

MESSGEN can create a Fortran INCLUDE file and a C header file defining symbolic names for the status values and a facility message file which is used by the Starlink Error Message Service (EMS) to associate messages with the status values.

A utility program CREMSG is also provided in the MESSGEN release. It may be used to create a MESSGEN source file from an existing, standard-format Fortran error INCLUDE file.