In a recent note, Patrick O'Keefe said: > Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 15:17:11 -0500 > > And why would you expect an application programmer writing in COBOL to even > know that manual exists? Why should he/she even know it's possible for > the programs to be invoked by anything other than EXEC PGM=... )where a > 100-byte parm limit has existed forever)? > > You seem to be thinking in system programming mode, but that's not where > the problems will surface. > First, IANASP. (I suspect that's amply evident from my contributions to this list.)
But, I'm sharply aware that programs can be invoked other than from JCL; I learned it perhaps 10 years _before_ I had any contact with or detailed knowlege with IBM mainframes. It was about the second thing I knew of S/360. (The first is that a word is 32 bits.) I was in a cocktail party conversation with a research associate who was a true-blue IBM partisan and was deprecating the CDC equipment we were using. Among his litany of advanges of IBM conventions was the orthogonality of programming interfaces: a program written in any language could be used as a subroutine of any other language; likewise any program written to be invoked by OS/360 as a main program could equally be invoked as a subroutine of another program. It seems to be ancient and widespread lore; perhaps less true nowadays than it was 35 years ago. -- gil -- StorageTek INFORMATION made POWERFUL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
