> >Having said that the limitation of using characters outside of uppercase >alphabetic and national (#@$) characters in JCL for PROCs and INCLIUDEs (in my >judgement) is predicated upon the parsing engine that the Converter has. >Having written a parsing engine the prospect of "tinkering" with the Converter >parser makes me very uncomfortable :-( I'm not saying it can't be done or >even that it shouldn't be done but my discomfiture puts it further down my >(personal) priority list :-) > >??? Somewhere there's a TRT or the like that identifies characters valid >in symbols. Just add the lower case alphabetics to its table and be >done with it. > >(Actually, Conway's Law requires that there be several (perhaps hundreds) >such tables. (To wit, the inconsistent treatment of hyphen in DSNAMEs.) >But still ...) > >It was a colossal blunder to provide the CASE() option in Binder; even >worse to choose the wrong default. > >-- gil
Gil, I have no specific knowledge of how the parsing engine of the Converter is put together, it could have one or many means of validating symbols. I would speculate that the dis-allowance of lower case alphabetic characters actually occurs somewhat earlier in the parser than the recognition of a symbol, but this is just an educated guess on my part. It is based upon my own experience with parsing and casual study of the "JCL Reference" manual. For the specific case we are talking about (e.g. the use of lower case alphabetic characters in PROC/INCLUDE names) I would actually feel much more comfortable if the parser allowed for them to be treated differently than say a ddname. The prospect of trying to accommodate lower case alphabetic characters in a ddname is well into the "boiling the ocean" category :-( I will note in passing that outside of the context of the z/OS Unix filesystem it is difficult (but not impossible) to create a PROC or INCLUDE (member name in a PDS or PDS/E) with lower case alphabetic characters, to the best of my knowledge none of the predominate development tools (e.g. ISPF, etc.) allow it. I take no position on whether they should, I simply observe they do not. Given this circumstance pursuing lower case alphabetic characters in PROC/INCLUDE names seems to take us perilously close to the "boiling ocean" that I am so desperate to avoid :-) John McDowell ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
