On 7/11/2013 2:32 AM, Paul Gilmartin wrote:
On Wed, 6 Nov 2013 10:06:39 -0800, Jon Perryman wrote:
JCL not having loop capabilities has nothing to do with rewinding card readers.
*I* believe he was being facetious.
Yes! I do have a propensity for being flippant.
IIRC, Brooks regretted that JCL was rushed and was never thought through
properly. He envisioned something like an interpreted PL/I. In other
words a fully featured imperative language that could do much more than
just schedule programs.
I was lucky enough to work for a shop that were running different
platforms and cross-trained sysprogs to support them all - MVS, AS/400
and AIX. I was and am still impressed by AS/400. When you scrutinize CL
it seems to be what Brooks always wanted from JCL. Look how easy it is
to convert a spool file to HTML on i series
http://search400.techtarget.com/news/556555/CL-Source-Code.
It has to do with variable substitution occurring as interpretation time. How
would you get out of a loop except by using the CC? �Except in extreme cases,
would running the same program multiple times without a JCL change really do
something useful.
Surely an extension to JCL to support looping would include test conditions
(perhaps on values of JCL symbols) other than CC.
As for complaining about JCL EXEC statement being first is unnatural, I have to
laugh.
Please laugh. I think a couple of us were engaging in hyperbole; even as
when I called "IEBGENER" "intuitive".
-- gil
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