On Tue, 24 Nov 2020, at 01:25, Paul Gilmartin wrote:
> I suspect it's a cultural influence. TSO designers expected programmers
> to be so repulsed by the necessarily unbalanced "(" in:
> "EXECIO 1 DISKW" <file-spec> "(STRING" <expression>
> ... that they required an assignment and a stem, or a push and pull.
EXECIO started off being a command on CMS systems. Commands there
often took the basic syntax form
command parm .. parm (optional parms [)]
where one could provide a trailing closing bracket but they were usually
missed-out.
The same is true under TSO etc - there's nothing to stop you providing a
closing bracket, if you want one.
--
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
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