On Sat, 5 Jan 2008 09:16:22 -0600, Rick Fochtman wrote:
>
>Maybe a front-end process or that creates a long PARM string from
>control statements?
>
Sure.
Provided that symbol substitution within those control statements
is supported.
And provided that those control statements with substitutable symbols
can be imbedded within library PROCs.
I suspect that proponents of a change would be unwilling to give up
some of the facilities of PARM to gain length.
And, from an ISV point of view, provided that I can count on that
front-end process's availability in every customer's shop.
I've long used Rexx EXECs to build long PARMs and invoke programs
with those PARMs. More recently, I keep much tailorable JCL as
Unix shell scripts with the JCL body as instream data ("here-documents",
which support symbol substitution; I've easily worked around
the variable-length bugbears suggested by a skeptic). But I wouldn't
inflict either of these techniques on a customer.
I haven't investigated ISPF's file tailoring; Rexx and sed have been
enough for me. But the ISPF facilities sound complicated, and
the entities far less self-contained than JCL with longer PARMs
supported would be. Does file tailoring address the record length
concerns?
-- gil
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