OS/VS2 R3.6 had a major upgrade to CLIST that in most ways was an improvement,
but it changed the handling of quoted strings such that there were scenarios
requiring counting a ludicrous number of apostrophes. Despite that issue, the
conditional logic was useful enough that I retrofitted it to OS/VS2 R 1.7 (SVS).
What is SPF? There were two names with the same initials. Or did you use both?
I used a home grown IDE built around AUX, CNTRL and UPDATE files, with
automatic construction of a standard comment block in every new assembler H
file and a bunch of local tools. I found XEDIT to be a very friendly
environment for tool building. It was all REXX except for one function package.
This was before pipes, and I found CMS itself inferior to TSO, but XEDIT was a
game changer, and the use of CNTRL files made merging independent updates to
the same source file a breeze.
One thing about VM is that you can IPL CP under CP ("second level"). This cane
in handy when a new release of VM/SE ("SEPP") worked fine on IBN displays but
had a garbled logon screen with Sylvania IS/7800 terminals. Running second
level VM I saw that the logon code exploit the buffer address adjustment of the
RA buffer order, while the 7800 left the buffer address at its original
position.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
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