What Are Protection Violations?

A protection violation occurs when a machine instruction tries to execute and is found to be illegal in the context of the currently running process. This might be because the instruction is not recognized by the processor (as is the case if data is executed as if it were a procedure), or if a valid instruction references a memory location or other resource that is invalid in the context of the currently running process. There are two classes of protection violation, general and COBOL protections violations.