I was just sayin'

My impression of the COBOL compiler is no different than yours.

Charles

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf 
Of John McKown
Sent: Friday, January 13, 2017 12:27 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: New free / open source z/OS tools from Dovetailed Technologies

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.

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