This thread has very largely straightened itself out. For the record, i.e., for the sake of anyone who reads through it in the archives:
1) parameters and subparameters are of two sorts, positional and keyword 2) many historical keyword subparameters, e.g., those of the DCB= keyword parameter, have been half promoted: they continue to be usable as subparameters, but they may now also be coded as parameters 3) PARM= is a keyword parameter 4) The permissible lengths of the values of parameters vary widely [wildly?] 5) The curious restriction that positional parameters must precede keyword ones has been retained, a long, long time after its relaxation in the HLASM macro language 6) In these and other respects JCL has become a patchwork. It is no longer coherent: a knowledge of some of its facilities does not permit plausible, almost invariably confirmed conjectures about the rest of them to be made. 7) Op. cit. [in the work (already) cited] is a suitable locution for avoiding the repetitive full identification of a document. In standard scholarly usage it must be accompanied by a page number, paragraph reference, or the like; and this requirement is a particularly urgent one when the document in question contains multiple, not entirely consistent discussions of the same topic. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
