It's a piece of cake using REXX with ISPF Table Services.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@listserv.ua.edu> on behalf of Paul Gilmartin <0000000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> Sent: Monday, July 9, 2018 8:56 PM To: IBM-MAIN@listserv.ua.edu Subject: Re: REXX as JCL replacement On Mon, 9 Jul 2018 16:45:00 -0700, Charles Mills wrote: >I wrote a product that as part of its processing generated JCL. (It was a side >chore; it was not a "JCL-generator.") ... > I've done that a lot. I like to keep JCL embedded in POSIX shell scripts as here-documents. o Not Rexx, first because Rexx has no instream data facility. o I can use shell looping to generate multiple similar job steps. I might do somewhat the same with PROC calls, but I think shell source is more compact than JCL. And finer granularity: I can write a shell function that generates a single DD statement -- not so with a JCL proc. o I can substitute shell variables in JCL commands and JES instream data alike. I started doing this before SET and DD *,SYMBOLS existed. It still works well. o Like Rexx it's free of the apostrophe catastrophe. Metacharacters arising from symbol expansion have no metasignificance -- they become ordinary text with no need to escape, protect, or double them. On Mon, 9 Jul 2018 20:11:17 -0400, Steve Smith wrote: >Ed Jaffe posted a video... it seems he worked some magic on it so that it's >only an excerpt from a longer presentation. It runs about 5 minutes, and >it's well worth that. Frederick P. Brooks had many talents, one of which >is he's an engaging and funny speaker. > >The upshot (for our purposes) of his talk was that while they had a lot of >smart people designing some smart languages, JCL somehow appeared without >ever being planned or designed. > I see much the same about HLASM. It has a woeful lack of lexical uniformity. > ...He *emphatically* states it's "the worst >language ever created, for any purpose, ever". Twice, if I counted >correctly. > >Learning JCL is like learning Sheephead... at some point, you start to >think people are just making sh*t up as they go along. Come to think of >it, I think they probably did. > https://secure-web.cisco.com/1Jgwmmw9bLf0xOyiZDG1PP1xIQg4CsupCNE-cVCbYmbzSZDMM3yKPaNSKAYszYfkF-qgdP7gUVy46NqcJZFPP9oJOOCIqLxwZPIUUb8mVrTavbnnx5w9VjO85EIlASos--nZ95hD6A6cjS7oDsmxSdAsBDIwTRHxNbEeXw2NDnhJyi6-39dzLNyj0D8ArB7L3EyFPi6M-jPPUFf2Wisd60J_-zaKOzpguch0JTIYpsQMPRh3rLe60Wmmvp9kyUTl98gNIlg-EpPg8IQ7r07hP_xhekRkemuENcHaHVrOtyawyPKCUHkfrha_uV6aKuxaxfKDVCLBdsb0u0Q7yRyXhcbGKoDjNTLx2Sumchu_BsNuQsVo8uqB21WybtdF8JIED6LV8-FkHwda8rVSbGglEKJ4POJQ00GLCDNxFmr5nZYftJsEmzC0ba42h7q4SqOua/https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSheepshead_%28game%29 ??? Calvinball? -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
