Until now posters to this thread, making jokes at the expense of the
handicapped, have mostly stopped short of nonsense; but
| They taught all the obscure utilities like IEBCOMPR and
| IEBDG.
is not innocuous.
Obscurity is of course situational. Urdu poetry is obscure to me because I
never learned to read Urdu, and IEBDG is obscure to many for much the same
reason. Inferences from obscurity to dispensability are, however, perilous.
The usefulness of IEBDG for generating test data|records that 1) have
statistically appropriate characteristics and 2) include boundary values is,
however, long established.
Its availability makes the generation of exhaustive testing materials so much
easier [and thus also so much more likely], compared to manual methods, that
anyone who in fact writes and tests mainframe programs should master it.
The generic importance of such tools would indeed be hard to exaggerate.
Compiler developers, for example, usually find it necessary to write statement
generators that produce licit but unconventional, even odd, language constructs
that people who know a language well tacitly exclude, as absurd, from their
testing materials.
"So much they talk'd, so very little said".
_________________________________________________________________
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