On 2017-06-30, at 13:44, Jesse 1 Robinson wrote: > I'm all in favor of the RFE in principle, but I think that choice of keyword > is crucial. Based on decades of history: what happens in JCL stays in JCL. > Forever. > > I personally find the OMVS keywords unintuitive and therefore--unless one > uses them frequently--deucedly difficult to keep straight. > Many of those were assimilated from UNIX/C, so you can't blame IBM. (But which were you thinking of?)
> ... In the ancient NDM (ancestor of Connect:Direct) 'REPLACE' is used in the > sense suggested by Gil: if it exists, overwrite it; otherwise create it; copy > the data and move on with no muss and no fuss. > > There are other possible values, but REPLACE seems to be available in JCL. > Old farts may remember the advent of 'REUSE' in the TSO ALLOCATE command. The > lengths we had to go to before REUSE move me to nominate the old mechanism as > the single worst design point of MVS. At least the one that impinged on users > in the most annoying manner. > Some of the problem with REUSE arose because "REUSE" (sometimes) has a specific meaning of converting an existing allocation. So for several releases after REUSE appeared in the ALLOCATE command it was incompatible with UNIX paths, which can't be converted. It's better now -- ALLOCATE REUSE simply frees the path and allocates anew. > Time for an innovation in JCL. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
