On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 2:18 PM, Charles Mills <[email protected]> wrote:

> My recollection is that STOW at least and probably BLDL and FIND are
> utterly character agnostic. You can create member names with non-printable
> characters in them, for example. As I recall you cannot reference them in
> JCL (of course) but ISPF displays them correctly and you can rename or
> delete them from 3.1. Been a long time -- I may be off on some of the
> details. Experiments would have been done around 1997.
>

​Ah, yes. A PDS can have a members named "A" and "a" in the same library.
But, given that the COBOL compiler does not allow specifying a lower case
name (or it automatically upper cases it), then you cannot have a UNIX file
named "a" (lower case) be processed by the COBOL compiler via a "COPY a"
statement. So the restriction that the COBOL copy code which resides in a
UNIX file requires that the UNIX file be all in upper case and consist only
of "valid" (according to COBOL) characters. That's what I was trying to
say, but didn't say very well.



>
> Charles
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On
> Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin
> Sent: Friday, January 13, 2017 12:09 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: New free / open source z/OS tools from Dovetailed Technologies
>
> On Fri, 13 Jan 2017 13:43:37 -0600, John McKown wrote:
> >
> >​There is a UNIX command: cob2 which will do a COBOL compile and link.
> >Basically this is just a "driver" which, as Gil indicated, parses the
> >UNIX command line parameters, does dynamic allocations for DDs needed
> >and then does (I think) a normal MVS LINK command to invoke the
> >standard COBOL compiler. Note that any UNIX directories in the command
> >are allocated to the proper DD and the "normal" BSAM / BPAM UNIX
> >interface code in the access method takes care of the I/O. That is,
> >there is no UNIX I/O code in the COBOL compiler itself. At least, I
> >don't think that there is. This is why the COBOL COPY verb cannot
> >process a file name like "SOMEFILE.cpy" and why the file in the UNIX
> directory must in in UPPER CASE, not in "normal"
> >lower case.​ On my system (z/OS 1.12), the cob2 command's full path
> >is: /usr/lpp/cobol/bin/cob2
> >
> I believe BPAM/BLDL/FIND is case-indifferent and that any UPPER CASE
> restriction lies in the compiler.
>
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-- 
There’s no obfuscated Perl contest because it’s pointless.

—Jeff Polk

Maranatha! <><
John McKown

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