There is a REXX function for parsing;it's either XPARSE or XPROC. Yes, REXX isn't as well integrated with the TSO stack as XLIST is.
What happens if you do CHAROUT with no terminating LF or NL? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Bob Bridges [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, March 27, 2023 5:59 PM To: [email protected] Subject: CLIST but not REXX Three things: 1) As Phil says, more-or-less automatic parsing of keyword and positional arguments. I get around that in REXX by using a standard opening paragraph that for most purposes works just fine with a minimum of customization. But mostly I prefer to use one-word arguments without any particular order and let REXX figure out what each one means, which simplifies the logic. For example, if it's got a period in it it's probably a DSN; if it's numeric and less than 20 it's one argument, if numeric and greater than 100 it's another, if it's "ACC" it's a keyword and so on. Sometimes I have to work harder, but not more often than every few years. 2) The ability to interact live with subsystems. In CLIST I can start an FTP session and interact with it, grabbing FTP's responses and deciding on the fly what command to issue next. In REXX I have to queue up an entire session, then call FTP and decide afterward how it went, just like a batch job. I've never found a way around this. 3) The WRITENR command, enabling CLIST to issue a prompt and pull the operator's response on the same line. REXX's SAY command types out a line and then goes to the next line for the response. This isn't hard to get around: I just wrote a CLIST named WRITENR which receives the prompt from a calling program and uses WRITENR to display it - then a SAYNR exec in REXX that receives the prompt from a calling program and calls WRITENR. So in my REXX execs, if I want to do this (not often), I can call SAYNR as an external procedure. If you write your REXXes for execution in OMVS, I guess there are other features that are easier, CHAROUT maybe? --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end -- that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not ~wish~ to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man "wishes" to be happy; but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever that horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved -- just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free. -CS Lewis, "The Problem of Pain" */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Phil Smith III Sent: Monday, March 27, 2023 17:32 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. --- 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
