Back when CLIST was written, CAPS ON was pretty standard for almost everything, apart from SCRIPT docs. Even in the 1980s, writing in mixed case was the sign of rebellion or bravery. I was the rebel, to the surprise of nobody :-)
I had to use CLIST for some TEST subcommand stuff, and I remember battling with CLIST all the way, desperately sprinkling &STR() and &NRSTR() almost at random to make it just *Do What I Mean* :-) At least 20 years since my last CLIST, I can't flush this from from my tortured memory, something like PROC 0 DEBUG CONTROL NOCAPS NOCONLIST NOSYMLIST NOLIST IF &STR(&DEBUG) EQ DEBUG CONTROL CONLIST SYMLIST LIST Or was it CONTROL ASIS? (shiver!) When I heard of TSO/E Rexx being available, I was so pleased I forgot to break for lunch. Roops On Thu, 9 Jan 2025 at 19:49, Paul Gilmartin < [email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 9 Jan 2025 16:06:22 +0000, Schmitt, Michael wrote: > > . > >CLIST has no syntax for quoted text. It is just text. In this case, CLIST > is passing the string to ISREDIT, and /that's/ where the quoting it, i.e. > it is part of the Edit macro syntax. > > ... > >This lll is why I hate coding in CLIST. It is a language that fights > against the programmer at every opportunity. For example, CLIST is trying > to evaluate everything that's in the quoted string, so if you have & or > something that looks like an operator, it will fail. > > > As you said, "CLIST has no syntax for quoted text." And, apparently, no > way to escape special characters. > > > >I will rewrite the ILISTS as REXX before making changes to them, but that > is easier said than done. CLISTs tend to be spaghetti code. And it doesn't > help that REXX gives uninitialized variables their own name as a value. > > > Use SIGNAL ON NOVALUE to prevent that. It's how I begin every REXX > program. > > My worst case: Once, as an experiment or accidentally I coded > "do" instead of "DO". It failed with a message like: > ILLEGAL STATEMENT: "DO". > > That's wrong two ways: > i) "DO" is not illegal. > i) "DO" is not what I coded. > > CLIST has a mortal terror of lower case. > > -- > 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
