Tom Marchant has made another of his characteristic contributions---They are
comprised of much rhetoric sprinkled with elements of correct but irrelevant
information---to this thread. My post addressed the problem of providing a
placeholder for a sometimes but not always required DD statement within a
(cataloged or in-line) JCL procedure. It provided such a mechanism (one that
generalizes to provide not just one but n such placeholders) for doing this
parametrically; and Mr. Marchant does not dispute that this scheme does just
that (or even address its substance). I then added en passant, because another
poster to this same thread had said that everyone but John Gilmore had judged
that DSN=NULLFILE and DD DUMMY were equivalent, that they were not in fact
equivalent, suggesting that my placeholder scheme illustrated one of the ways
in which they are different. Now this scheme uses parametric replacement of a
default DSN= value by another, non-default one; and one of the merits of the
DSN=NULLFILE construction is that it can be used to make such parametric
substitutions possible, albeit not as a placeholder. In addressing this not
very tendentious observation, if that in fact is what he was doing, Mr.
Marchant reminded me that an entire DD DUMMY statement can also be overridden.
This is true, and I am also prepared to concede that the earth is an oblate
spheroid. John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
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