At 17:10 -0600 on 08/04/2006, Paul Gilmartin wrote about Re: WHY IS
JCL ALLERGIC TO LOWER CASE?:
In a recent note, David W Neylon said:
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 17:48:59 -0500
My question is then why did it ever matter? Since there was no
lower-case needed for specific parms why not simply make JCL case
insensitive. It certainly would've helped in those days of the 3270
AA/Aa button.
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 ...
JCL is a fixed format language (like Assembler is). All that is being
asked for is that all strings that are Keywords be parsed as if they
were uppercase just like you can now in Assembler (ie: The Opcodes
can be lower/mixed case as can the labels (so long as you do not
duplicate a label that matches another when both are converted to
either upper or lower case [IOW: Label1 precludes a LABEL1, label1,
LaBeL1, etc.]).
IOW: //x dd sysout=a is "seen" as //X DD SYSOUT=A. Any parm that MUST
be Uppercase (such as the dataset name in a DSN=? when not quoted)
would still be a an error if supplied as dsn=dataset.name but valid
if dsn=DATASET.NAME or dsn='dataset.name'. Since the JCL Parser KNOWS
what is a Keyword, a Positional Parm, and a Keyword's parameter (ie:
Everything between the "=" and the next ',' [not counting embedded
commas in a (...)" parameter string]), why is so hard about ignoring
the case of a Keyword and Positional Parm (ie: The JCL Statement's
label and type (ie: JOB/EXEC/DD/etc.) and parsing it as if it were
Upper Case?
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