While the 80 character limit has a long history, I have problems with the idea to change the length of a JCL card for what might be a benefit. Not having to learn how to code parameters that span more than one "card image".
The biggest problem I see is that interactive device one uses to view / edit that JCL. While a mod-5 terminal exist (to display 133 characters) the standard 27 lines or is it 24 lines is very limiting. Not to mention the size of the characters on the screen. A long time ago I played with a source program written in PL/1. The compiler supported input of more than 80 characters. At the time I was interested in writing code that had indentation to improve readability and the 80 character limit was causing a readability problems. Taking two 80 byte records and generating a longer input to the compiler did help. But was more of a problem than a benefit. While I did save the source code, in a longer than 80 byte LRECL dataset, editing the source code was a big pain. You had to always be shifting left and right to see the complete line of input. Kenneth Leidner Imagination is more important than knowledge. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of EA MacNEIL Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 10:30 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: 80 byte jcl record limit >> In fact, PARM= is limited to 100 bytes. It can take more than 1 line of >> JCL. So 80-byte limit for jobcards is not an issue in this context. ..... I totally disagree. Longer JCL cards would solve a lot of problems in specifying PARMS that span records. I have always hated the 80-byte card limit which had really gone the way of the dodo, ever since MVS had an interactive component. (As someone else said, teaching somebody how to span a PARM across more than one record is very difficult at o'dark-thirty when production is waiting to complete in time. Ted MacNEIL [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
