The inconsistent PARMLIB syntax horse escaped from the barn many years ago.
I am not an IBM "insider" but it is obvious to me that re-engineering every one of the PARMLIB consumers to support a uniform (and marvelous) syntax, while maintaining backward compatibility, would have been a Sisyphean task. Plus, are there not third-party PARMLIB syntax checkers which would have been broken by the change? I'm not a sysprog. When I need a PARMLIB change I send an e-mail with please and thank you. But I think IBM deserves thanks for what they have done, even though it admittedly falls way short of perfect. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Edward Gould Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2016 10:17 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Comments in SYS1.PARMLIB Cheryl: > On Aug 23, 2016, at 2:51 PM, Cheryl Watson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Ed, > > Regarding "Letting IBM off with variations is nonsense.", I choose to think > of it as being pragmatic. I can complain all day about how IBM's reduction > of staff is hurting the mainframe, but the fact is that they are doing it > despite anything I might say or do. Believe me that putting people to work > on implementing "/" and "*/" in each parmlib member is NOT going to make it > into the line items for a new release with higher priority work and reduced > staff size. I believe in holding IBM to a standard that they themselves developed. I shudder to think that each parmlib member will have it own syntax. This goes agains every thing that IBM espouses. I will be long gone and I still think that this will be a dangerous precedent. As I said in my previous email, I have had to do updates to parmlib on the fly as a fellow sysprog forgot a comma and all of a sudden VTAM would not come up nor CICS due to an APF issue because of a stupid missing comma. Luckily I never made the mistake. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
