On Sat, 27 Nov 2010 11:16:02 -0600, Joel C. Ewing wrote: > >Actually this touches a minor raw nerve ... >I >never have liked WAD or longevity as a excuse for a design flaw, but if >it took us 25 years to have this case be an issue and since there are >easy circumventions (e.g, don't misuse "/*", use JCL checking for >"trivial" changes), there are probably better things for IBM to fix. > As long as they don't fix it, it will remain broken. An analogue of the categorical imperative should operate here. The accumulation of defects, none of which seems worth fixing in itself, renders the system unacceptably difficult to use.
One solution would be that the reader would embed a high-quality JCL checker as a preprocessor. The benefit to the customer would be worth a fairly high price. >In any event, while having both in-stream and out-of-stream error >messages would be nice (which HLASM does support), if we had to choose >between only one or the other for JCL, having a clearly visible and >correct out-of-stream error message is much preferable to having only a >buried in-stream message. > Yes. And here I see the flaw as the absence of clearly visible message, consistent with the convention, whether in-stream or out-of-stream. I'd prefer in-stream messages, easily located by a string search, and a message at the end for each of: o "Warnings issued." I consider "SYSIN DD *; GENERATED STATEMENT" a warning; it should be reported as such. It never occurs as a result of anything I code intentionally, and the warning is easily circumvented.. o "Job not run; JCL error." -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
