Hi Skip,
You said: "... Nor 'RACF', which everyone says as rack+f. ..."
Way back in 2000, when I was working at IBM full-time, I was involved
with a few ACF2->RACF conversions.
One customer kept driving me crazy by calling IBM's ESM "Ra-KEFF".
Regards,
David
On 2021-10-03 12:37, Skip Robinson wrote:
Newbie auditors are notorious for 'spelling out' abbreviations that over
the decades have become actual names. And yes, idiocy is only one
consequence. The result can be gibberish.
My favorite basket case is 'TSO', which was in ancient history Time Sharing
Option. For as long as anyone can remember, TSO has not involved 'time
sharing' in any meaningful way. Nor is it remotely optional. Spelling out
the words contributes nothing to any discussion.
Another favorite is 'JES'. Nobody spells it out. Nor 'RACF', which everyone
says as rack+f.
On Sun, Oct 3, 2021 at 6:59 AM Charles Mills <charl...@mcn.org> wrote:
I don't abbreviate in documentation or discussion.
Hmmm. I think referring to the console command P resonates with people
more than STOP. I wonder if people do not recognize XMIT better than
TRANSMIT. The goal in documentation should be clarity, not pedagogics.
I once had an all-out war (I won! I was the president!) with a tech writer
who insisted that the documentation should spell out Multiple Virtual
Systems on the first reference to MVS (in technical documentation for a
hardcore mainframe product). My position was that it made us look like
idiots.
Charles
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Sunday, October 3, 2021 6:23 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: PL/I vs. JCL
On Sat, 2 Oct 2021 20:56:43 -0700, Charles Mills wrote:
I have no problem with the DD/member ambiguity:
1. If it's a personal tool and you are happy with the ambiguity, then you
are happy.
2. If it's a "product" then you just document which takes priority.
o z/VM CP and CMS with their very flat syntax (no delimiters) allow
keywords
to be elided when their values do not overload other keyword names. And
some operands are required for admin users and optional or prohibited for
general users. And VM nerds delight in abbreviating keywords and command
names to single characters, baffling novices. Ugh!
o UNIX command options can be ambiguous with (non-portable?) filenames
beginning with "-". The resolution is to qualify with current working
directory:
"./-whatever".
I don't abbreviate in documentation or discussion. I write ALLOCATE, not
ALLOC; TRANSMIT, not XMIT; etc. (Oops! I wrote "admin" above.)
I wrote a (successful!) product that in one very peripheral feature took
an
operand that could represent a member name in a default PDS, a dataset
name,
or a zFS file name. I differentiated among the three based on length and
the
presence or absence of periods and/or slashes. No one ever complained that
they had a dataset or a zFS file named SHORTNAM and could not reference
it.
I think the convenience and simplicity of being able to say simply
FILENAME(whatever) outweighed the perils of the ambiguity. Product design
involves tradeoffs.
-- gil
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