On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:47:05 -0500, Joel C. Ewing wrote:
>On 04/18/2012 08:46 AM, Paul Gilmartin wrote:
>> On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:30:59 -0400, Veilleux, Jon L wrote:
>>
>>> According to the JCL manual that won't work:
>>>
>>> The following keywords are the only keywords supported by IBM and
>>> recommended for use in relational-expressions. Any other keywords, even if
>>> accepted by the system, are not intended or supported keywords.
>
>The syntax as "formally" described in the JCL Reference (z/OS 1.12) is
>demonstrably incomplete just based on the supplied examples. Something like
>// IF (&SYM = value) THEN
>is clearly valid by the manual's description if &SYM has a numeric value
>and "value" is also some numeric constant ...
>
No. In:
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/iea2b6b0/17.1.4.2
17.1.4.2 Comparison Operators
Use comparison operators in a relational-expression to compare a keyword
with a numeric value.
...
There is no mention of using a comparison operator to compare two numeric
values.
The "keywords" are listed in:
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/iea2b6b0/17.1.4.5
Note that "TRUE" and "FALSE" are not themselves keywords nor constant
values; they appear only (and superfluously) in complex tokens such as
"ABEND=TRUE" (which means exactly the same as "ABEND". Quine would
shudder).
I think I'll submit another RCF.
> But, in their own examples IBM uses as valid constant values things
>like "Unnn", "Snnn", "TRUE", "FALSE", none of which are described as
These are not used as constant values, but as lexical parts of "keywords".
>keywords and which clearly are not numeric in the normal sense of the
>word! Obviously some special alphanumeric constants are acceptable,
>which begs the question why other arbitrary alphanumeric constants that
>can't be confused with keywords should not be explicitly allowed as
>operands as well. (Maybe they work even though undocumented, but usage
>in that case would be risky!)
>If the relational expressions directly supported by JCL are found too
>restrictive, one could always write a fairly trivial utility ...
>
JCL tailoring with ISPF skeletons?
-- gil
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