I agree with David Crayford's comment, 100%! Let's put this to rest. To completely replace JCL with REXX is not an option. If you want to run certain applications driven by REXX program, by my guest, that's a design issue. But please don't plan on replacing everything with REXX.
Roger W. Suhr [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of David Crayford Sent: Monday, July 9, 2018 21:32 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: REXX as JCL replacement 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 > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
