About JCL, Paul Gilmartin wrote:
" . . . Its objectives make JCL more like a macro processor than a programming
language, but it failed to incorporate much of the current assembler's macro
processing capability, and neither JCL nor HLASM conditional assembly has
graceful branching nor [sic] clean iteration."
Statements of this sort are and should be constitutionally protected, but this
one is without much redeeming technical merit.
JCL has been criticized by those who have not mastered it since the time of OS
PCP. Its syntax, borrowed from that of then current assemblers, is said to be
"difficult to learn", for reasons that I have never understood; but it is not
indefensible. In particular, it is more powerful than the alternatives to it
that I have seen.
He begins here by attempting to distinguish a macro processor and a programming
language, implying it would seem that a macro processor is not a programming
language; but he then proceeds immediately to criticize, a little
ungrammatically but unambiguously enough, both JCL and the HLASM as lacking two
of the important attributes of programming languages, viz., "graceful
branching" and "clean iteration". Now grace and cleanliness are in the eyes of
their beholders. Consider
|&baid setc '&macname'.'__boolean_array__'
| gblb &(&baid)(1)
|&nbae seta n'&(&baid)
|&i seta 0
|.reiz_loop anop
|&i seta &i+1
|&eoa setb (&i gt &nbae)
| aif (&eola).reiz_lend
|&(&baid)(&i) setb 0
| ago .reiz_loop
|.reiz_lend anop
This HLASM macro-language statement group resets the elements of an array of
created global binary/boolean set symbols to their default value, boolean 0.
Someone unfamiliar with the HLASM macro language would find it unintelligible;
and there is a familiar, now tedious perspective from which it is judged
long-winded and/or detail-ridden; but there is nothing unclean about it.
Examples of this sort could be proliferated ad infinitum et nauseam, but they
would not persuade Mr. Gilmartin to my views, and that is as well.
What distresses me about these views is not their substance, with which I
expect usually to disagree. It is his perspective. He judges that his needs,
which I often judge to be whims, should be satisfiable all but immediately,
without much programming, by a tool that he is using and that the machinery
employed to do so should conform to his particular, municipal notions of
cleanliness and grace.
These requirements ensure that he will always be dissatisfied with every tool
he uses that was designed and implemented by others. We are all creatures of
our own very different experiences.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
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