CLIST has nested variables, REXX doesn't. And CLIST has keyword style parms, while REXX arguments are strictly positional. And, in REXX you can't turn off first level substitution of &Variables when sending commands to ISREDIT, which makes it tricky to do Edit macros, such as "change all &TEMPDSN to &TEMPDSN2".
But CLIST gets negative points for the way it wants to evaluate EVERYTHING, recursively. REXX is so much better but I want to ask Mike Cowlishaw what he was thinking in making uninitialized variables default to their own name. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Phil Smith III Sent: Monday, March 27, 2023 4:32 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Stop the ragging on COBOL please Steve Thompson wrote, in part: >Oh, I haven't had to deal with it for a while, but as I recall >there is a function that CLIST can do that REXX couldn't (well >back in the 1990s). I wonder if that is still true. Perhaps easily parsing a typical TSO command: verb arg1(value1) arg2(value2a,value2b) ? You can certainly do it in Rexx, but (and I've never written a CLIST in my life) ISTR that CLIST makes it much easier. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
