On 2017-12-12, at 12:07:54, Phil Smith III wrote:
>
>> I found that SuperC produced cleaner UPDATE files than XEDIT.
>
> Can you elaborate? All I can think that you mean is that it ignored
> touched-but-not-actually-changed records.
>
Exactly.
> The experienced update creator
> with XEDIT will always review an update after creation, both to look for
> these ("Hey, I didn't think I changed that line.ah, no, I didn't") and to
> look for places where scrunching a big change in where one line existed
> caused strange sequence numbering.
>
I had SuperC available to do that heavy lifting for me.
> Having used XEDIT in update mode for 30 years, I find the power of updates
> plus AUX and CNTRL files to be pretty amazing for maintenance of code, and
> the tools that do update by replacement of the entire file much more
> difficult to use, even after almost 20 years of those. YMMV.
>
Its outstanding shortcomings are:
o It doesn't support RECFM V
o It requires sequence numbers.
A couple earlier contributors to this thread have mentioned
alternative tools (mostly not z-based) free of those limitations
and which do a 3-way merge.
-- gil
