The notion that JCL is somehow hateful is widespread and not new. In the 1970s a colleague kept telling me that [UNIVAC] Exec 8 was much superior to JCL. He showed me what it required to compile and execute a FORTRAN program, which he thought compared very unfavorably with the JCL required to do the same thing.
I investigated and found that he was right; but there was a rub: Exec 8 was not good at doing much of anything else. Gerhard Postpischil's point is the crucial one: JCL is a well wrought compromise between simplicity and power. Still, it has a bad reputation; and when the time came last year to teach it systematically to my teenage geniuses, I opted for a non-standard approach. I asked each of them to write and test a lexical breakout routine for current z/OS MVS JCL in either C or PL/I, giving them a VDL definition of this JCL as a basis for doing so They all succeeded. (They are fiercely competitive, and it was all but foregone that if one did they all would.) Then, having mastered the syntax and some of the semantics of JCL, they all learned to use it very rapidly. I am not sure that this scheme would scale up, and there are other reasons to be wary of its generality. Its success has, however, made me suspicious of the low-level, brutally empirical, step-by-step, from-simple-to-complex approaches to teaching and learning JCL that are usual in the industry. There is, finally, something else in play here too. If you want to sell someone a mass-market cell phone, you make it easy to use, even at the expense of functionality. If, on the other hand, a young statistician said to be that he didn't think Tauberians were user-friendly, i would want to help him to master whatever about them he found puzzling, but I would also make it clear to him that they were a part of the plumbing that he needed to master. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
