given the name of the test, "preBufferedAbort", I assumed that the error comes from not calling flush on the output stream. however, adding that changes the error message to:

testpreBufferedAbort
program=''
Expected exception for unclean termination caught: java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid empty program.
unclean termination expected:<1[]> but was:<1[2]>

Any hints on what magic is needed with this test case?

It's a label marking a location in the program for your flow control instructions to have targets.

I'm down to just a single test case erroring out for my java implementation of this kata:

testpreBufferedAbort
code=''
program=''
Expected exception for unclean termination caught: java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid empty program.
unclean termination expected:<1> but was:

I'm puzzled. The "code" block is empty, yet there expects to be some output in the output stream? I dont understand how.

I'm at 114 of 115 passed, but I don't see how this test case can ever pass.