>>I tell my students, OS/360 Job Control Language is the worst >>programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any >>purpose and it was done under my management.
>Don't brag; it's always possible to do worse. I recall that DOS/360 had a series of file-to-file utilities (no device independence so you needed a disk to tape utility, a card to tape utility, a tape to disk utility, ...) whose control card syntax was way worse than OS/360 JCL. DOS/VSE JCL is arguably worse than OS/MVS JCL: the DLBL statement with its umpteen positional parameters makes the DD statement look downright user-friendly. And VSE is much more dependent on POWER control cards than MVS is on JES control cards, and the syntax is totally different from JCL -- JES statements are at least closer to JCL in syntax. And anyone else ever write IV-Phase assembler? 5-character symbols, of which only three (24 bit word machine) were significant, so NOTAG was the same symbol as NOTUP. And it did not flag duplicates, it just silently redefined the symbol. Nor did it flag undefined symbols -- just passed them to the linker as externs. The JCL was pretty bad too ... Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 1:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Why is JCL so bad was Re: Basic question on passing JCL set symbol to proc On Sun, 3 Jan 2010 19:01:00 +0100, Lindy Mayfield wrote: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
