General Information › Basic Conventions and Requirements › Control Statements

Control Statements

All COMMANDS consist of a character string of ten characters or fewer. While a command does not have to begin in any particular position, nothing can precede it in a statement.

Following a command (and preceded by one or more spaces) is a series of PARAMETERS that can consist of a combination of keyword and simple entries. Parameters can be specified in any order for a given command.

Certain KEYWORD PARAMETERS can supply either a single value or a list of values contained within parentheses and separated by commas. The limit on the number of values in a list varies with each particular command. Common examples are lists of data set names and volumes.

COMMAND STATEMENTS can be continued to additional lines in two different ways.

• One technique permits termination of one statement line with a complete parameter and a trailing comma, with the remaining parameters starting in any position on the next line.
• An alternate continuation technique requires coding of the statement being continued through column 71 and placement of an X in column 72 to designate that the statement is being continued. The first non-blank character in the following statement is appended to the character in column 71 of the previous statement.

Whenever many parameters are specified for a given command, the first parameter must begin in the statement containing the command. A statement with only a command is processed as having no parameters.

Parameter names can be abbreviated down to their first three characters, unless more characters would be needed to uniquely determine between similarly named parameters.

COMMENTS are permitted within the control statements. An ASTERISK in column 1 designates them. They are printed out in the CA Disk CMDPRINT exactly as they appear within the control stream.