Cray Research had a linker named SEGLDR that was written in Fortran, whose STOP statement allows an optional string message, and so it was used for run-time ass

Cray Research had a linker named SEGLDR that was written in Fortran, whose STOP statement allows an optional string message, and so it was used for run-time assertion checking like IF(.NOT.CHECK()) STOP 'xxx' Anyway, somebody (not me) got into trouble when Very Serious Customers were offended by seeing the occasional STOP DAMN message at link time.