Paul Gilmartin wrote:
Culture. Rexx is Rexx. Rexx is not CLIST. Attempting to code in language X as if it were language Y is the road to intense frustration.
That's not what I've done. I'm coding in REXX as if it's REXX. Probably because it is.
I believe that the HLASM macro processor does not allow coding the minimum number of chars to make keywords identifiable. Do you spend behemoth code when you author a macro to satisfy that "requirement"?
Irrelevant. My goal was to transform a very large CLIST-based system into REXX. There are dozens of CLISTs calling each other.
The approach I took, which I still regard as an excellent one from an upward compatibility and interoperability standpoint, was to replace the CLISTs one-by-one with REXX counterparts over several releases. That way, there was no pressure to change/redesign everything at once. Also, because this was an infrastructure within which customers often plugged-in their own "home grown" CLISTs. I did not want to force customers to rewrite all of their CLISTs in REXX.
My approach was to write an external REXX function to perform IKJPARS emulation. In this design, any CLIST in the calling hierarchy could be transparently replaced by a REXX. Parameters are passed to/from the external function via the data stack. Just takes a few QUEUE/PULL statements at the top of the REXX to provide full CLIST compatibility.
I'd still be interested to hear if others were able to emulate IKJPARS in fewer lines. One thought I had, only after it was too late, was to make the external REXX function an assembler language program. In that case, I could have called IKJPARS directly. One advantage to what I've done is that it does not need TSO/E. The same code should work on any REXX platform: z/VM, Windows, OS/2, etc.
-- Edward E Jaffe Phoenix Software International, Inc 5200 W Century Blvd, Suite 800 Los Angeles, CA 90045 310-338-0400 x318 [email protected] http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
