On 7/1/22 9:03 am, Andrew Rowley wrote:
On 7/01/2022 11:37 am, David Crayford wrote:
Isn't JCL already a really good tool for what it does?
Maybe, but it's a terribly designed language. I worked on AS/400
boxes in the 90s and the Control Language (CL) was a legit Turing
complete program language. Why couldn't JCL have been the same?
I think it is a mistake to think of JCL as a program language. It is a
language that defines what to run and the environment to run it in. So
it is better compared to XML, JSON etc or even a makefile than e.g.
shell scripts.
I understand that it's declarative. But it has logic such as IF/THEN.
That is no reason why it couldn't have been a scripting language like CL
on AS/400.
The syntax is poor, admittedly, I think as a result of having evolved
over time rather than developing a strict definition at the start. It
would probably be possible to write a new interpreter and replace JCL
with XML or JSON without losing any functionality - if it is the
syntax that bothers you.
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