Charles M wrote <snip> As does MODIFY, which I think of as very analogous to START, since the data ends up in more or less the same place. </snip>
In implementation, MODIFY is nothing like START (because of what parsing is done by the system of the command itself). Each individual modify "owner" parses according to whatever rules they have chosen (and, one hopes, documented). The system's parsing responsibility largely ends after determining the "name". The system passes whatever you typed (possibly morphed to upper-case). I'm not sure just when the upper-casing is done (it might even be done before anything even attempts to analyze what the command is). Charles M wrote <snip> parameters Program parameters passed to the started program. This might be a list in parentheses or a string in single quotation marks. </snip> That is the part I'm referring to (it is under "Starting a system task from a console"). It is incorrect for the 4th positional parameter. It is correct for PARM= . We will update to make that clear. If you want my guess (without trying to figure out if true or not), support for single quotation marks came later, was done by someone who didn't know about the 4th positional parameter who didn't notice in the doc update that there were two cases that this doc update applies to (even though the code update covered only one). Bill G wrote <snip> On this page of the z/OS MVS System Commands manual, under "operands" it says "no embedded blanks". It refers to commands in general, not just the "start" command. </snip> This shows the danger of an incomplete reference without necessary context. This is within a section "Typical format" and that section starts with "Most system commands". Yes, this is indeed the typical format. It is not the only format. It might be close to correct to think of this as the default format, or to think of it as "this, unless the specific command documents otherwise". There are commands which happily accept embedded blanks (typically, those do not require separation of parameters by a comma) and for which comments are delimited by /*...*/. Peter Relson z/OS Core Technology Design ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
