On Mon, 9 Jul 2018 16:45:00 -0700, Charles Mills wrote:
>I wrote a product that as part of its processing generated JCL. (It was a side
>chore; it was not a "JCL-generator.") ...
>
I've done that a lot. I like to keep JCL embedded in POSIX shell scripts as
here-documents.
o Not Rexx, first because Rexx has no instream data facility.
o I can use shell looping to generate multiple similar job steps. I might
do somewhat the same with PROC calls, but I think shell source is more
compact than JCL. And finer granularity: I can write a shell function
that generates a single DD statement -- not so with a JCL proc.
o I can substitute shell variables in JCL commands and JES instream data alike.
I started doing this before SET and DD *,SYMBOLS existed. It still works
well.
o Like Rexx it's free of the apostrophe catastrophe. Metacharacters arising
from symbol expansion have no metasignificance -- they become ordinary
text with no need to escape, protect, or double them.
On Mon, 9 Jul 2018 20:11:17 -0400, Steve Smith wrote:
>Ed Jaffe posted a video... it seems he worked some magic on it so that it's
>only an excerpt from a longer presentation. It runs about 5 minutes, and
>it's well worth that. Frederick P. Brooks had many talents, one of which
>is he's an engaging and funny speaker.
>
>The upshot (for our purposes) of his talk was that while they had a lot of
>smart people designing some smart languages, JCL somehow appeared without
>ever being planned or designed.
>
I see much the same about HLASM. It has a woeful lack of lexical uniformity.
> ...He *emphatically* states it's "the worst
>language ever created, for any purpose, ever". Twice, if I counted
>correctly.
>
>Learning JCL is like learning Sheephead... at some point, you start to
>think people are just making sh*t up as they go along. Come to think of
>it, I think they probably did.
>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepshead_(game)
??? Calvinball?
-- gil
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