In a recent note, R.S. said:
> Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 12:58:43 +0100
> >
> > I tried to understand both JCL Reference and UG (the latter not
> > even giving a single hit when doing a fuzzy search for 'symbol'
> > ...) but came up clueless.
>
In #<<< 5.4.2.1 "z/OS V1R7.0 MVS JCL Reference"
______________________________________________________________
5.4.2.1 Defining and Nullifying JCL Symbols
* Do not specify JCL symbols within other JCL symbols. The
results can be unpredictable, especially if the imbedded JCL
symbol is not previously defined.
It's not clear whether this restriction is meant to apply to
the name field or the parameter field. Neither construct
results in an error message.
> We also can discuss why it works in that way, but IMHO it is as
> senseless as discussion about JCL improvements.
>
JCL improvements happen, however sensless. Most of us can remember
when "SET" itself didn't exist.
But not withstanding the disagreement of one regular contributor
to this list, SET would be more useful if substitution were
performed within the parameter field of SET, according to the
same syntactic rules as applied to the PARM field of the EXEC
statement. Consistency has merit here.
And it's simply irresponsible for the designers to cower behind
"unpredictable" rather than causing an error message to be issued
for whatever construct is unsupported.
Which brings us back to Bob Shannon's question:
> Is there anything about MVS that you actually like?
URL: http://bama.ua.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0608&L=ibm-main&D=1&O=D&P=32264
Certainly not here.
-- gil
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