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A comment on New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system. Parent comment

Re:New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment... by dbcurtis on Saturday April 04, 2020 @10:01PM (#22783141)
> JCL

  ERROR IN OR NEAR CARD 1 COLUMN 1
  0C7 ABEND
  ABORT
  CORE DUMP FOLLOWS:
....

About the only other thing I remember is:

  //SYSIN DD *
No. Thank. You.
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Re:New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment... by DrScump on Sunday April 05, 2020 @01:59AM (#22784027)
If you get an S0C7, your JCL is probably fine (else you wouldn't get far enough to get a data exception).

JCL is just another scripting language. I found it fun. I did all the JCL for my group's production jobs and commented the hell out of the esoteric issues to help Operations triage things. A small, well-planned effort prevented a crapload of, well, crap.

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Re:New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment... by skissane on Sunday April 05, 2020 @05:01AM (#22784605)
> JCL is just another scripting language

One feature of JCL which I think is cool, is that whereas on Unix processes inherit file descriptors which are numeric only (and hence few applications know what to do with anything other than FDs 0-2), in JCL you instead have DDNAMEs which are 1 to 8 characters. I think, if Unix had alphabetic names for inherited streams rather than just numbers, you might see more Unix programs supporting more than three inherited streams.

Another feature I think is cool is catalogs. A database mapping dataset names (file paths basically) to the filesystem volume (disk or tape) on which the file lives. You can move a file to another disk or to tape without changing its name/path.

(Strictly speaking both of these are features of the MVS operating system as a whole, not just JCL per se, but JCL is one of the main interfaces to them.)

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Re:New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment... by DonHopkins on Sunday April 05, 2020 @05:53AM (#22784781)
JCL is certainly not any worse than bash.
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