Breakpoint

For load mutual funds, the dollar amount for the purchase of the fund's shares that qualifies the investor for a reduced sales charge (load). The purchase may either be made in a lump sum or by staggering payments within a prescribed period of time. The latter form of investment purchase in a fund must be documented by a letter of intent.

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For example, suppose that an investor plans to invest $95,000 in a front-end load mutual fund and faces a sales charge of 6.25%, or $6,125. If a breakpoint of $100,000 exists with a lower sales charge of 5.5%, the investor should be advised to invest an additional $5,000. If the investor can add another $5,000 to the investment, he or she would benefit from a lower breakpoint sales charge of $5,500, or a savings of $625 on this transaction.

Mutual funds are required to give a description of these breakpoints and the eligibility requirements in the fund prospectus. By reaching or surpassing a breakpoint, an investor will face a lower sales charge and save money. Any investor purchase of fund shares that occurs just below a breakpoint is considered unethical and in violation of NASD rules.

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1. Deposit account balance below which zero reserves are required. The current value is published in the Federal Reserve Bulletin.

2. Account balance where the interest rate earned (or paid) is raised or lowered. Graduated interest loans allowed in some states charge a higher rate on the initial portion of an open-end loan or credit card outstanding balance, up to, say $500, and a lower rate on higher balances.

3. In mutual funds, the point at which the sales commission charged is lowered, because of the size of the transaction. Most funds have several breakpoints.

For other uses, see Breakpoint (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with Break point.

The debugging interface of Eclipse with a program suspended at a breakpoint.

A breakpoint, in software development, is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes. More generally, a breakpoint is a means of acquiring knowledge about a program during its execution. During the interruption, the programmer inspects the test environment (logs, memory, files, etc.) to find out whether the program functions as expected.

In practice, a breakpoint consists of one or more conditions that determine when a program's execution should be interrupted.

The most common form of a breakpoint is one where the program's execution is interrupted before a programmer-specified instruction is executed. This is often referred to as an instruction breakpoint.

Other kinds of conditions can also be used, such as the reading, writing, or modification of a specific location in an area of memory. This is often referred to as a data breakpoint, or a watchpoint.

Breakpoints can also be used to interrupt execution at a particular time, or upon a keystroke etc.

Many processors include hardware support for breakpoints (typically instruction and data breakpoints). Such hardware may include limitations, for example not allowing breakpoints on instructions located in branch delay slots. This kind of limitation is imposed by the microarchitecture of the processor and varies from processor to processor.

Without hardware support, debuggers have to implement breakpoints in software. For instruction breakpoints, this is a comparatively simple task of replacing the instruction at the location of the breakpoint. But implementing data breakpoints in software can greatly reduce the performance of the application being debugged.^[1]

Some programming language implementations expose their debugging functions for use by other programs. For example, some FORTRAN dialects have an AT statement, which was originally intended to act as an instruction breakpoint. Python implements a debugger accessible from a Python program.^[2] These facilities can be and are^[3] abused to act like the COMEFROM statement.

See also

• IBM OLIVER (CICS interactive test/debug)
• SIMON (Batch Interactive test/debug)
• SIMMON

References

1. ^ GDB Internals -- Watchpoints
2. ^ Python Library Reference: The Python Debugger
3. ^ entrian.com - goto and comefrom for Python

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