It's more like 39**2 than 65535, right? Only uppercase alphamerics? Agreed. JCL is kind of sad in many areas where it surely would not take a lot of resources to relieve some constraints (such as this one). The ability to specify hex (non-alphameric) DLM= values would improve things considerably here, with nada in the way of upward compatibility issues.
Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2016 11:04 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Sort for not there? (hyperspaced from ASSEMBLER-LIST) On 2016-01-06, at 11:45, John McKown wrote: >> >> //DD1 DD *,DLM=AA > > True. I've used $$ quite a bit myself. But in the _general_ case, how > can you guarantee that whatever characters you select will _not_ occur > as the first two characters in the "sample" data? > Well, the Pigeonhole Principle guarantees that if the data don't exceed 65,535 lines a suitable value must exist. But how to find it? I might take this to IBM-MAIN; someone is apt to jump in with a DFSORT/ICETOOL solution. Hmmm. Count occurences of each initial digraph and select any zero value. But are zeroes counted? Why isn't DLM allowed to be longer? If it were a few dozen characters, there's be a guaranteed value for any plausible size data set. I suppose one could concatenate SYSINs with a different DLM for each, until the concatenation limit was encountered. I hate JCL! It ain't 1965 no more; we shouldn't be burdened with resource constraints designed for 1965. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
