When PL/I was designed, programs only ran in batch mode, with no possible intervention from the programmer at a terminal. An exceptional condition such as division by zero would abort the program yielding only a hexadecimal core dump. PL/I exception handling, via ON-units, allowed the program to stay in control in the face of hardware or operating system exceptions and to recover debugging information before closing down more gracefully. As a program became properly debugged, most of the exception handling could be removed or disabled: this level of control became less important when conversational execution became commonplace.