"in the beginning" there was the 026 keypunches, and upper case jcl. Dis you ever try to multi punch lower case chatacters? The 1404 only had upper case until the ucs buffer was added to the 2821 contoller. The old habits are hard to break and "there was no need for lower case" The old microfiche had lower and embarissingly showed lower case (1 ibmer lost his job over what was "hidden" in lower case. IBM had wisely include loer case in their character set with no way to show it.
-----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark Thomen Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 12:41 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: WHY IS JCL ALLERGIC TO LOWER CASE? > > -----Original Message----- > > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Behalf Of Bruce Black > > Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 12:26 PM > > To: [email protected] > > Subject: Re: [IBM-MAIN] WHY IS JCL ALLERGIC TO LOWER CASE? > > > > > > > > > > ISNT IT TRUE THAT IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS ONLY UPPER CASE ? > > Just in case you are serious: my S/360 green card (undated) > > shows upper > > and lower EBCDIC values. But early 3270s only supported > > upper case, and > > I vaguely remember that 026 keypunches didn't have lower case > > either (I > > think that came with the 029 keypunch). So us oldtimers rarely saw > > lower case in the "good old" days. > > > > -- > > Bruce A. Black Ahhh, I remember the good old days.... No shift keys, no lower-case - it was so simple... There are some issues with lower case - data set names cannot contain lower case characters; a parm that inserts data for a data set name will be rejected with a JCL error. It's also not clear what the JCL processor should do with lower-case. Do the programs that get invoked expect lower-case? How many programs (in the world) would have to upper-case items to properly interpret them? Parameters like AMP, STORCLAS, MGMTCLAS, and others added over the years would have to be modified to support lower-case. It's not just "allowing them in JCL" - some of these parameters are passed to IBM components, and to vendor products. Can you imagine how much work it would take to support lower-case? Thanks, Mark Thomen Catalog/IDCAMS/VSAM Development ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
