Took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that what I thought was silly in some of the non-mainframe programming languages I'd encountered, the feature called a "file handle", allowed programs in those languages the same flexibility that DD names give in JCL.
--- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. -E B White */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Tom Brennan Sent: Friday, January 7, 2022 00:13 Maybe a bigger issue is with non-mainframe folks wondering why JCL is there in the first place. I started with microcomputers, programming things in BASIC where we were told to hard-code full filenames in the program itself. Already I could see how silly that would be in production, having to change the source code just to work with different files. Unix solved that in clever ways with parameter passing, stdin, and things like that which work well in shell scripts. Mainframes solved it with 8 character DD names and JCL redirection. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
