[Info-vax] Removing the leading $ from commands in a new DCL language

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Craig A. Berry <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> wrote:
> On 5/1/15 4:22 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
 
>> That's why in my alternate scheme, it's the inline data which has a
>> prefix character instead (which is stripped by new-DCL before the
>> rest of the line is passed to the program.)
 
> That would be a really unfortunate design IMO. It would mean parsing
> data and interpreting what a line is *within* data rather than simply
> searching for an end-of-data indicator. Sure, it should be possible, but
> why unnecessarily complicate something as simple as DECK/DOLLARS (or the
> heredoc of Unix shells and Perl)?

As I understand it, it was an accident that IBM chose /* as the
EOF indicator for in-line data in JCL, at just about the same
time that PL/I chose /* to start comments.  Don't start your
comments in column one.

(This is one of the PL/I features C inherited.)

-- glen