Well, I am a TSO bigot and grew up on CLIST, but once I had REXX available in TSO/E I bid CLIST a fond AMF. As is common in such cases, while REXX is in general far better than EXEC2 and CLIST, there are things that that it lacks.
ISPF versus XEDIT is harder.ISPF has significant advantages as an application framework, and ISPF/PDF EDIT has some nice features that XEDIT lacks, but XEDIT is on balance a much better editor. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Jack Zukt [[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, May 20, 2023 3:55 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: XEDUT vs. ISPF (was: Typo ...) Hi, That made for some interesting reading. I was quite proficient with REXX and XEDIT before moving to MVS and ISPF. The first MVS I worked with did not yet have REXX. It was helish doing the transition to ISPF and CLIST. I still find VM help much better than MVS's. One of the first things that I do when starting on a new MVS system is to put an edit macro named QQ on the SYSPROC or SYSEXEC concatenation, so that I do not have to write CANCEL. I really do not like having that on a pfkey. Too much grief because of that. I find that XEDIT environment capabilities permit us to tailor our working environment far more than ISPF but, as always, I think that has more to do with our path than with the products themselves. As I said at the beginning, it really was an interesting reading. Regards Jack On Sat, May 20, 2023, 00:08 Paul Gilmartin < [email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 19 May 2023 18:32:57 -0400, Phil Smith III wrote: > > ... > >>I was trying to automate that in a macro on PF3. > > > >Yeah, that makes sense. > > > I learned a smattering of ISPF before any XEDIT; the latter in the > era before PQUIT and QQIT intruded: the wrong solution. But > I immediately longed for ISPF's smart END which did a Save only > when needed and left the timestamp unchanged otherwise. > > And I was irritated by XEDIT's behavior of *always* scrolling to > center the target of a successful search, usually needlessly > > And it was disappointing that the XEDIT-based *LIST menus always > ran in separate rings, never sharing with each other, PEEK, and > XEDIT. They should have used ADDRESS XEDIT instead of CMS. > > I wasted too much time scripting around such things, never > modifying IBM code, only using undocumented interfaces. > And it all went for naught when a major update broke them > > -- > 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
