Script is Turing complete, so in a pinch you can do things that you don't normally think of as document processing, e.g., generating backup schedules. I much prefer a good markup language to a WYSIAYG word processor. Take m$ office - please!
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <[email protected]> on behalf of Jeremy Nicoll <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, December 11, 2017 4:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Macro Processors On Mon, 11 Dec 2017, at 20:19, John Ehrman wrote: > I agree that PL/I's macro preprocessor is indeed powerful; but it and > all other macro facilities I know of lack a key feature of HLASM's > conditional assembly and macro facility: an intimate interaction > between the base language and the macro language. While the > HLASM facility is a bit primitive in some ways, it can still do things > that no other can. The macro language inside IBM's DCF/Script allows one to write some quite complex document handling things. (All of their GML was written in it.) Long ago I wrote something complicated in it that added a third pass to a normal 2-pass document formatting process. My extra code allowed sections of text (anywhere in the overall set of files defining a complex document) to be extracted and written to a set of temporary files. The second & third passes were like a normal document formatting process but they skipped over the sections of the file set where those texts had been defined; and allowed their content to be embedded one or more times anywhere you wanted in the final document. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
