On Nov 30, 2005, at 12:20 PM, Walt Farrell wrote:
Unfortunately, since different systems in a sysplex (or sharing the
spool) could have very different times and dates, they could get
very unexpected results if we let those symbols be used in batch
job JCL.
Suppose the job converted on a system where the date is today, and
ran on a system where the date is several days, or weeks, ago.
(The normal case is to have them very close, of course. And the
more likely unusual case is to have them simply a few hours off.
But nothing requires that the dates/times be anywhere close across
systems, that I know of.)
Walt
That answer is just barely passible for dates and times in a
compulsive case, but what about other symbols where there is no
ambiguity.
Without getting hung up on the "system symbols", there are plenty of
symbols of the &SYSUID type that could be painlessly provided by IBM
that would make JCL a little bit nicer to work with. Things like
&JOBNAME, &JOBNUMBER, &STEPNAME, &PROCNAME, &NESTLEVEL and others
are fully resolvable without any ambiguity about the converting or
executing system. What about those?
Why does IBM even bother dangling &SYSUID in front of us if that is
all they are ever going to provide?
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