On 10/07/2018 7:15 AM, Andrew Rowley wrote:
On 9/07/2018 10:46 PM, Hobart Spitz wrote:
Basically, JCL is so far from real a programming language, that I can't
describe it.
That's because JCL isn't a programming language. There are plenty of
other languages that also suck as programming languages e.g. HTML,
XML, JSON, but that's not what they are supposed to be.
Java Batch (JSR 352) has basically re-implemented JCL using XML. Now
that must really suck!
JCL is really a kind of definition language. In programming language
terms it is more like a set of classes in OOP than a language in
itself: you have a job, which has steps, steps have DDs etc. The
syntax is old fashioned, but the concepts are very much OOP. It would
be relatively simple to create a set of classes in your OOP language
of choice to hide the syntax - just create a Job object, add Step
objects, add DataDefinition objects etc. and have a Submit method emit
JCL.
If I want to write a program, I will choose a programming language. If
I want to define a unit of work to the system, JCL does a pretty good
job. I definitely prefer JCL to long command lines with multiple
switches and options defining input and output files, which is the
non-z/OS equivalent.
Andrew Rowley
Black Hill Software
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