Yes, COND is ugly, unnatural and a booby trap for the unwary, but I never broke myself of the habit of using it. I would, however, want to train a newbie to understand it but to use IF/ELSE for new JCL.
Whether I string things together in JCL or in a REXX script depends very much on what I am trying to do, and the question of AND/OR logic on completion codes is pretty far down my list of considerations. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Steve Smith [sasd...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, May 24, 2021 6:37 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: JCL COND vs IF/THEN - Best catch up resources for MVS / ZOS Technologies The problem I have with COND= is that it's back-asswards. First, it specifies conditions to NOT run the step. You have to keep in mind that with multiple conditions, any TRUE condition means don't run the step. Except for ONLY & EVEN, which specify conditions for which the step *will* run. Second, the natural way to code a test is to say "if variable [comparison] value", not the reverse that COND requires. It's certainly possible to train yourself to grok that, but it's about as unintuitive as it can be. The IF / ELSE constructs are a great improvement in understandability. You can continue using the old way if you like, and I don't see any argument that the new way causes any problems. So what's the complaint? For the record, I use both COND and IF as I see fit, but if an OR or AND rears its head, I'm likely to recast the whole thing into REXX. sas ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
