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Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by jg＠jordi.guillaumes.name

El 01/10/2013, a les 0:40, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> va escriure: As (primarily) UNIX people, we are trained to think in terms of abstraction layers and common interfaces. The IBM mainframe world in general, and JCL in particular, find no value at all in that. Production shops today, on modern hardware, still sometimes think in terms of allocating cylinders on disk drives for job output. Not 'sometimes'. Most of times. A IBM educated programmer misses the possibility of limiting the output storage used by a program. The idea of a runaway program eating a whole filesystem is... weird. On the other hand, the 'file' concept is abstract in MVS. The programmer uses 'files' which are bound to real physical datasets via JCL, so there is some level of abstraction at the I/O level. VMS and RSX 11M+ have the logical name stuff, which can be seen as similar to the DD cards in a job. Unfortunately UNIX dies not have anything similar (symlinks being the closest ). JCL is fast to parse, efficient to execute, and hard to read and write. Most of the JCL is generated automatically from skeletons or put together by a program. It is a little bit hard to code JCL by hand, but it is really easy to write a JCL generator. The IBM mainframe world never bought into that bullshit idea of "programmer time is more important than processor time", because, well, it isn't. The programmer does whatever is fastest for the computer to execute. Well, the damn subcapping thing makes an installation to be very aware about CPU usage. And, one way or another, IBM always wins this war... -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

11 years, 8 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

On 09/30/2013 05:13 PM, Sampsa Laine wrote: JCL is really easy once you begin to think "in JCL" instead than in DCL/whatever script language. The weirdest thing it has is the COND expression, which works the opposite it seems to have to work. Everything else is just syntax you can learn (or look at in a manual). I'm not quite there yet :) Need to read a bit more of the JCL books I have I fear. But yes, it's not strictly speaking a scripting language, more like a definition of how to run a payload (such as a COBOL compile+link), no? In any case the syntax is WEIRD compared to DCL or bash, you have to admit.. DCL and Bourne shell are a combination of interactive and scripting languages, while JCL is entirely a batch language. Its syntax reflects its heritage and intended usage pattern. As (primarily) UNIX people, we are trained to think in terms of abstraction layers and common interfaces. The IBM mainframe world in general, and JCL in particular, find no value at all in that. Production shops today, on modern hardware, still sometimes think in terms of allocating cylinders on disk drives for job output. Once you get used to that, and realize that even though it may offend your sensibilities at first, that it's really "ok", it all becomes much easier. JCL is fast to parse, efficient to execute, and hard to read and write. The IBM mainframe world never bought into that bullshit idea of "programmer time is more important than processor time", because, well, it isn't. The programmer does whatever is fastest for the computer to execute. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

11 years, 8 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by gregg.drwho8＠gmail.com

Hello! That would be me. RJE is being worked on. But there are still timing issues to be worked on, and the big driving issue is that people wanted to connect to Hercules as a linemode driven device, telnet via Putty for example. Let's just say that at the time didn't work. The 3.09 release may work, I believe the development releases do work. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 5:55 PM, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons <jg at jordi.guillaumes.name> wrote: To go back in topic, I'd love to hook my MVS 3.8J Hercules instance to HECnet using (at least) RJE. I think someone in this list is aware of the Hercules side developments... IIRC there is a 2880 emulation being worked. That could interface with a DMC to expose the VAX as a RJE workstation. Any idea about the status of that development in the Hercules side? Jordi Guillaumes i Pons Barcelona - Catalunya - Europa El 30/09/2013, a les 23:32, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> va escriure: On 30 Sep 2013, at 23:27, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons <jg at jordi.guillaumes.name> wrote: As for compile and link, there are prebuilt JCL procedures at SYS1.PROCLIB; you should not bother to write the steps yourself, just invoke the procedure and do some DD override to inject your source code and your listing output. My zOS instance is now offline... I can put it up to search it for you. No that's fine, I can fire up my OS/390 or z/OS instances if I want to play around with this stuff :)

11 years, 8 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by jg＠jordi.guillaumes.name

To go back in topic, I'd love to hook my MVS 3.8J Hercules instance to HECnet using (at least) RJE. I think someone in this list is aware of the Hercules side developments... IIRC there is a 2880 emulation being worked. That could interface with a DMC to expose the VAX as a RJE workstation. Any idea about the status of that development in the Hercules side? Jordi Guillaumes i Pons Barcelona - Catalunya - Europa El 30/09/2013, a les 23:32, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> va escriure: On 30 Sep 2013, at 23:27, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons <jg at jordi.guillaumes.name> wrote: As for compile and link, there are prebuilt JCL procedures at SYS1.PROCLIB; you should not bother to write the steps yourself, just invoke the procedure and do some DD override to inject your source code and your listing output. My zOS instance is now offline... I can put it up to search it for you. No that's fine, I can fire up my OS/390 or z/OS instances if I want to play around with this stuff :)

11 years, 8 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by sampsa＠mac.com

On 30 Sep 2013, at 23:27, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons <jg at jordi.guillaumes.name> wrote: As for compile and link, there are prebuilt JCL procedures at SYS1.PROCLIB; you should not bother to write the steps yourself, just invoke the procedure and do some DD override to inject your source code and your listing output. My zOS instance is now offline... I can put it up to search it for you. No that's fine, I can fire up my OS/390 or z/OS instances if I want to play around with this stuff :)

11 years, 8 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by jg＠jordi.guillaumes.name

El 30/09/2013, a les 23:13, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> va escriure: But yes, it's not strictly speaking a scripting language, more like a definition of how to run a payload (such as a COBOL compile+link), no? In any case the syntax is WEIRD compared to DCL or bash, you have to admit.. Yes, and yes. The syntax is basically ASSEMBLER syntax. IBM uses the assembler parser to do a lot of things, and that lot of things looks like assembler source. As for compile and link, there are prebuilt JCL procedures at SYS1.PROCLIB; you should not bother to write the steps yourself, just invoke the procedure and do some DD override to inject your source code and your listing output. My zOS instance is now offline... I can put it up to search it for you. Jordi Guillaumes i Pons jg at jordi.guillaumes.name HECnet: BITXOV::JGUILLAUMES

11 years, 8 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by sampsa＠mac.com

On 30 Sep 2013, at 22:41, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons <jg at jordi.guillaumes.name> wrote: JCL is really easy once you begin to think "in JCL" instead than in DCL/whatever script language. The weirdest thing it has is the COND expression, which works the opposite it seems to have to work. Everything else is just syntax you can learn (or look at in a manual). I'm not quite there yet :) Need to read a bit more of the JCL books I have I fear. But yes, it's not strictly speaking a scripting language, more like a definition of how to run a payload (such as a COBOL compile+link), no? In any case the syntax is WEIRD compared to DCL or bash, you have to admit.. sampsa

11 years, 8 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by jg＠jordi.guillaumes.name

El 30/09/2013, a les 21:38, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> va escriure: name but it was a blessing because the shell commands were beyond human Ever try to write anything in JCL? :) That language is messed up, I have about 3 books on it and still can't really figure out how it works except by direct copying scripts from the book to a live system. Sometimes I even manage to compile COBOL programs, but I haven't figured out the LINK EDITOR which one needs to turn the output into an executable. Interesting experience though, might come in handy when I come across clients with big System z or S/390 setups.. JCL is really easy once you begin to think "in JCL" instead than in DCL/whatever script language. The weirdest thing it has is the COND expression, which works the opposite it seems to have to work. Everything else is just syntax you can learn (or look at in a manual). JCL is NOT a script language. If you look at it under that perspective, you will never grasp it. (I used to be one of the few rare people who wrote his JCL decks from scratch, beginning with the first //USERNAME JOB XXX... card ;)). Jordi Guillaumes i Pons jg at jordi.guillaumes.name HECnet: BITXOV::JGUILLAUMES

11 years, 8 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by sampsa＠mac.com

name but it was a blessing because the shell commands were beyond human Ever try to write anything in JCL? :) That language is messed up, I have about 3 books on it and still can't really figure out how it works except by direct copying scripts from the book to a live system. Sometimes I even manage to compile COBOL programs, but I haven't figured out the LINK EDITOR which one needs to turn the output into an executable. Interesting experience though, might come in handy when I come across clients with big System z or S/390 setups..

11 years, 8 months

Humour value alternative to DCL - a port OS/390 ISPF to VMS :)

by ploopster＠gmail.com

Hans Vlems wrote: It is good fun but those panels kept me well away from IBM systems. AIX had something similar as an aid to system managers. I forgot its name but it was a blessing because the shell commands were beyond human comprehension... SMIT. Peace... Sridhar

11 years, 8 months

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