I’m always assumed JCL was designed back when my dad was but a lad, and that certain conventions had not yet become conventional. The COND statement, for example, might have seemed intuitive to me had the rest of the world ended up following that backward order; as it is, I have to look it up each time to be sure I'm doing it right. Other things may have seemed reasonable to the inventors of JCL, but later usage proved there were better ways. Tough; it is what it is, now, and very few improvements can be made to it without invalidating bazillions of lines of existing JCL code, which would not earn IBM the lasting gratitude of their customers no matter how brilliant the upgrades.
--- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* On June 14 a giant asteroid, discovered only three days earlier, passes within 75,000 miles of the Earth. Congress immediately holds hearings, with the Democrats charging that the Bush administration should have known about it sooner, and the Republicans noting that the asteroid had been heading this way during all eight years of the Clinton administration. -from Dave Barry's 2002 "Year in Review" */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of David Crayford Sent: Thursday, January 6, 2022 19:37 Maybe, but it's a terribly designed language. I worked on AS/400 boxes in the 90s and the Control Language (CL) was a legit Turing complete program language. Why couldn't JCL have been the same? --- On 7/1/22 12:28 am, Jeremy Nicoll wrote: > Isn't JCL already a really good tool for what it does? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
