John,

I share your feeling :-)  Stealing (sharing :-) code is a time honored 
technique, one that I have every intention of making part of my "new JCL" 
proposal (if it ever gets that far :-)

My memory of the 026/029 keypunches was that you could enter lower case 
alphabetic characters, you just didn't want to without a really good reason :-) 
 I also seem to remember a higher incidence of card reader jams because the 
punched cards were not as stiff because more material had been removed from the 
card (multi-punch was more than just a name :-) this resulted in misfeeds/jams 
due to the mechanical nature of card readers.  (Note: This same problem was why 
object code was notorious for card jams :-(  

John McDowell

>I always got the feeling that orignal OS/360 JCL programmers either stole
>the parsing code from the then-existant assembler, or vice versa. JCL and
>old style assembler just seem to be so syntactically similar that somebody
>must have swiped some code. And, again, we go back to old style keypunches
>as to what the original JCL thought was reasonable to expect. Keying in
>lower case on a 026 - is that even possible? I wish that JCL would
>"advance" like HLASM did. HLASM accepts lower case for things, but
>automatically upper cases them unless they are in ' or " strings.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Reply via email to