Problem:
What is the 'mfdebug' terminal setting?
Resolution:
When running under the control of the Animator any screen output is cached in memory. If you swap to the user screen (i.e. by pressing F2 or by executing an ACCEPT), the contents of the cached screen are displayed. The program has no terminal of its own because it's under the control of the animator. So, when the program writes to the terminal, it is actually passing terminal sequences to the animator to be decoded and cached. The Animator uses a generic terminal definition called 'mfdebug', which defines all the capabilities required.
Because of this it is not recommended that the screen-swap Animator be used if a non-COBOL sub-program is performing a lot of screen I/O. A better solution is to use cross-session animation. This is documented in the Debugging Handbook.
