On Thu, 28 Feb 2019 16:25:23 -0800, Charles Mills wrote: > >As I recall now I have had this issue before, and solved it with (or >something like) > >// SET Q='''' >... >// SET LONGSYM=&Q.&SYM1.&SYM2.&Q > Yup. It is a misdesigh that symbols are not substituted between apostrophes in the operand of SET as they are in PARM, DSN, PATH, and a couple others. Does any IBM representative dare to defend this bad choice, other than, "Because we could!"
In fact, why not everywhere! Be consistent. It's also wrong that apostrophes introduced by symbol substitution are not treated as ordinary text, not metacharacters. Rexx got that one right, but JCL designers seem to be too proud to learn from Rexx. >Thanks again. @Gil hates EBCDIC. I have to admit I am not overly fond of JCL. > JCL semantics, though not its syntax, are somewhat justified by the object of static identification of all resources a job needs to serialize. EBCDIC has only a poor diachronic explanation. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
