One thing that, IMO, is keeping JCL in business is shear inertia. Too many
times I've had people, especially programmers, resist doing any "unnecessary"
clean up of JCL. IMO, all COND processing should be done with the new
IF/ELSE/ENDIF construct. But I can't even get them to write new JCL using this,
much less convert old JCL ("It works and it's too much trouble to change, test,
and run through change control.") They keep cutting and pasting old JCL into
new JCL. The same with the newer constructs in COBOL. They like to cut and
paste (supposedly) working code.
Relative to this is the internal control blocks created via JCL need to stay
the same, or very similar. Why? We couldn't use the new if CA-11 doesn't
support it. That is why we don't use UNIX and REXX stuff. CA-11 doesn't support
restarting complex shell scripts or REXX programs. I guess doing that would
require something akin to checkpoint restart for compiled programs. And who
uses that???
--
John McKown
Systems Engineer IV
IT
Administrative Services Group
HealthMarkets(r)
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List
> [mailto:ibm-m...@bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Clark Morris
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 9:28 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu
> Subject: Why is JCL so bad was Re: Basic question on passing
> JCL set symbol to proc
>
> On 3 Jan 2010 06:49:27 -0800, in bit.listserv.ibm-main you wrote:
<snip>
>
> JCL was designed for OS360 on a 256K real machine (the original design
> point for PCP was 64K). In addition, I suspect that the design was
> done by engineers or mathematicians for whom "not and" and "not or"
> were familiar concepts. Virtually all of the printers were upper case
> only and at least in my shop it was a struggle to get a printer that
> printed the special characters correctly (the 48 character train was
> adequate FSVO adequate). Lower case was out of the question. Memory
> and instruction cycles were at a premium. Even on a 1 megabyte mod 65
> we were stingy about region sizes.
>
> While I share your (Paul's) distaste for JCL, the crime is that IBM
> hasn't provided a clear migration path for at least new things to
> either REXX or one of the shells. It also hasn't provided a migration
> path so that we could have longer member names, longer data set names
> and a generation data set facility for ESDS data sets. We are stuck
> on software architecture that was designed for the limitations of the
> original 360's using work arounds and kludges. It is for this reason
> that I am not optimistic about the long term viability of the z series
> and z/OS.
> >
> >-- gil
> >
>
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