I used to have a tiny portable manual card punch. An acquaintance used it to punch /* in the first two columns of his punchcard based utility bills. (those characters have special meaning to 360 JCL. They have multiple punches per column, so it required making a punch, then backspacing to make the other punch(es))
On Wed, 17 Jan 2018, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
/* = end of data set /& = end of job One wonders how a S/360 "C" compiler might deal with this. Preceding it with a space might do the trick.
Yes, it would, but how would you get 100% compliance wiht no mistakes from PROGRAMMERS?
A 360 s'posedly COULD be told to ignore, or to respond to something else, but that wasn't usually available. Accordinglyly, when we needed to use a 360 to duplicate a deck that had JCL cards, we would turn the source/data deck upside down. (hope that it didn't have '/' in column 80?)
