On Nov 1, 2017, at 1:22 PM, Jesse 1 Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: > > In the big view, system symbols are over 20 years old. For many years, > symbols were honored for STC and TSU but not for batch. IBM was reluctant to > support batch for reasons mentioned by Lizette and others. I participated in > more than one open discussion at SHARE where different folks had very > convincing reasons for symbols to be substituted in various incompatible > ways. But symbols had to be managed in only one way, and there was forceful > disagreement. > > So IBM left it up to the customer whether to honor symbols in batch. If it > works for you, turn it on. Otherwise don't. But you should move gradually. Be > prepared to back out. Since system symbols in batch are a (relatively) new > thing, you need to verify that in your environment you get the results you > expect. Caveat emptor.
Thanks for all the responses. If you care about why I asked, I’ll add an explanation. Feel free to skip the rest of this if you don’t care. Almost 20 years ago we wrote our own, in-house batch scheduling system. It doesn’t require analysts to write JCL; they enter the characteristics for their jobs, steps, and data definitions via forms and then the scheduling system generates the JCL at submission time. Today, there is very little hand-written JCL in our environment. This is great, but our system doesn’t integrate very well with non-mainframe processes, and that sort of integration is becoming increasingly important. We’ve acquired a commercial job scheduling system (Stonebranch Universal Automation Controller, if it matters) which handles that kind of integration well but of course doesn’t generate JCL. Our in-house system is able to include things like time stamps at certain places when it generates the JCL, but anything that uses UAC won’t have that, so I was investigating the possibility of using system symbols. Since we only have a single LPAR and so little user-written JCL, I think we should be able to do this without many problems. Thanks again. -- Pew, Curtis G [email protected] ITS Systems/Core/Administrative Services ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
