Hi Charles,
I guess that nobody bothered to tell the tech writer that the "S" in
MVS, is an abbreviation for "Storage".
Regards,
David
On 2021-10-03 09:58, Charles Mills wrote:
I don't abbreviate in documentation or discussion.
Hmmm. I think referring to the console command P resonates with people more
than STOP. I wonder if people do not recognize XMIT better than TRANSMIT. The
goal in documentation should be clarity, not pedagogics.
I once had an all-out war (I won! I was the president!) with a tech writer who
insisted that the documentation should spell out Multiple Virtual Systems on
the first reference to MVS (in technical documentation for a hardcore mainframe
product). My position was that it made us look like idiots.
Charles
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Sunday, October 3, 2021 6:23 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: PL/I vs. JCL
On Sat, 2 Oct 2021 20:56:43 -0700, Charles Mills wrote:
I have no problem with the DD/member ambiguity:
1. If it's a personal tool and you are happy with the ambiguity, then you
are happy.
2. If it's a "product" then you just document which takes priority.
o z/VM CP and CMS with their very flat syntax (no delimiters) allow keywords
to be elided when their values do not overload other keyword names. And
some operands are required for admin users and optional or prohibited for
general users. And VM nerds delight in abbreviating keywords and command
names to single characters, baffling novices. Ugh!
o UNIX command options can be ambiguous with (non-portable?) filenames
beginning with "-". The resolution is to qualify with current working
directory:
"./-whatever".
I don't abbreviate in documentation or discussion. I write ALLOCATE, not
ALLOC; TRANSMIT, not XMIT; etc. (Oops! I wrote "admin" above.)
I wrote a (successful!) product that in one very peripheral feature took an
operand that could represent a member name in a default PDS, a dataset name,
or a zFS file name. I differentiated among the three based on length and the
presence or absence of periods and/or slashes. No one ever complained that
they had a dataset or a zFS file named SHORTNAM and could not reference it.
I think the convenience and simplicity of being able to say simply
FILENAME(whatever) outweighed the perils of the ambiguity. Product design
involves tradeoffs.
-- gil
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