> CMS is an abomination. I used to call it clumsy monitor system. However, there are things in CMS that I would like to see in TSO.
> There are different macros for I/O to: disk; tape; terminal; card; printer; > ... The same was true for DOS; does z/VSE finally have a usable DTFDI? > And TSO, which provides TGET and TPUT rater than QSAM I/O > to SYSTSINI and SYSTSPRT. QSAM works just fine with SYSTSIN and SYSTSPRT. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Paul Gilmartin [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 7, 2022 12:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: DDNAMEs (was: Python ... REXX) On Thu, 6 Jan 2022 21:13:16 -0800, Tom Brennan wrote: > ... >Maybe a bigger issue is with non-mainframe folks wondering why JCL is >there in the first place. I started with microcomputers, programming >things in BASIC where we were told to hard-code full filenames in the >program itself. Already I could see how silly that would be in >production, having to change the source code just to work with different >files. > Does BASIC not support variables as filenames? (I'm BASIC-naive. Does BASIC have a string data type?) CMS is an abomination. There are different macros for I/O to: disk; tape; terminal; card; printer; ... However silly, you must change the source code. CMS Pipelines sort of solved that shortcoming with driver stages, at the expense of sacrificing support of Classic CMS utilities which are Pipelines-unfriendly. Likewise Rexx, which provides PARSE PULL and SAY rather than STREAM I/O to the terminal. And TSO, which provides TGET and TPUT rater than QSAM I/O to SYSTSINI and SYSTSPRT. And Assembler, with WTO rather than QSAM output to a console device. (But: "allocate dd(SYSTERM) path('/dev/console')" ) >Unix solved that in clever ways with parameter passing, stdin, >and things like that which work well in shell scripts. > But inconsistently. Some commands such as, "zip" put the output file first. Others, such as "cp" put the output file last. Yet others use keyword options, "if=" and "of=". And input to "tee"or output from "cat" can only be a descriptor. It's a glorious chaos! >Mainframes solved it with 8 character DD names and >JCL redirection. > Not entirely solved. There's still sometimes a need for an alternate DDNAME list: <https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.5.0?topic=lists-ddname-list>, like UNIX, but putting file handles, not filenames in an argument list. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
