Paul Gilmartin writes:
No! No! No! If the decision had been made for a case-insensitive
file system (in fact, no such decision was ever made, neither for nor
against, thus creating the problems), the implementation should not
have been in JCL, which would require parallel implementation in
numerous applications and utilities, but in Data Management itself,
so that a mixed case argment in any of JCL, TSO, IDCAMS, IEHPROGM,
SVC 99 text units, etc. would have equivalent results with no
need for case conversion in the individual utilities.
When I was a boy in this business there was much speculation about a
routine, necessarily SVC-based in those days, that was to be called
IEHDEITY. Invocable in many different circumstances, it was to resolve any
and all otherwise intractable problerms.
Like many of Paul's notions, his view of the case-sensitivity problem is at
once astute and naif because synchronic and not diachronic.
If it had been possible, circa 1964, to anticipate all of the demands that
data-management would be required to meet in the ensuing four decades,
machinery for addressing all of them could perhaps have been put in place
prospectively.
None of us was smart enough to anticipate all of these requirements; and in
the upshot
many utilities do substantive work of their own, No utility I am familiar
with limits itself to invoking some data-management facility to do all of
its substantive work for it.
Consider now a concrete problem. Many of my macros include parameters of
the form
<keyword parameter>=yes|no,
e.g.,
GUBBINS=yes|no
One may wish, as I do, to avoid coding much the same sequence of
conditional-assembly instructions to cope with each of many of these
conceptually similar situations, and for this purpose I use a sort of
subroutine macro definition, imaginativelty named YESNOCHK. It recognizes
any of
YES
YEs
YeS
Yes
yES
yEs
yeS
yes
NO
No
nO
no
as licit values of such a keyword parameter; and since their are only 2^3 +
2^2 = 12 distinct values to be recognized, it could perhaps do this
enumeratively, without case translation (in the HLASM macro language the use
of one or the other of the UPPER|upper or LOWER|lower BIFs).
Consider now not a short keyword value but a moderately long one like
NULLFILE. It has 2^8 = 64 case-independent variants, and translation is
already called for urgently.
I should like to see [largely] case-independent JCL, utility control
statements, etc., etc.; but Paul's retrospective recipe for olbtaining them
is utopian.
John Gilmore
Ashland, MA 01721-1817
USA
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