My pet peeve is the default for SPACE; "Absolute track not available" is not a user friendly error message for forgetting to specify SPACE.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Bob Bridges [robhbrid...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:33 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes" JCL: I used to complain about JCL's arcane and in some cases backward syntax. I mean, "COND=(0,LT,step.procstep)" - who made that up? But somehow over the years I've made my peace with JCL. It is what it is. And I would have done no better, back then. EBCDIC: A couple of years ago, when I was employed by a small mainframe security consulting company, a client came to them asking for help with a project to create a security product that would reside on a distributed platform but handle security on the mainframe. They were going to develop it for a client that was using Top Secret, but it could have been any of the three. These folks didn't know mainframes, which is why they hired my employers, who assigned me to the project. I said they "didn't know mainframes"; let's start with the fact that they didn't know about EBCDIC. But that's no problem, right? There are lots of things one can do to translate between EBCDIC and ASCII. In the process of working on this project I wrote, my very own self, a socket server that would handle both ASCII and EBCDIC clients. (I mention this because I'd never done any such thing before, and I was inordinately pleased with the fact that I could do anything so cool. Those of you who've done hundreds of those and take it for granted, please don't burst my bubble.) Then they discovered the whole issue of 3270 emulation. And I probably wasn't helping by trying to explain the complexities of mainframe security at about the same time. The client went away to think about the communications issue, and somehow they never came back; the project never went anywhere after that. --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* Always look a gift horse in the mouth. It may have hoof-and-mouth disease. -Bob Bridges, 1977 */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 19:18 > Yes, but JCL. JCL is to programming as Roman numerals are to arithmetic. And EBCDIC. "Doesn't play well with others." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
