[open-cobol-list] What do you think of JCL ?

[Patrick]

Hi Everyone

I have been daydreaming, on and off for the past few months , about 
creating a scripting language that would be read into Cobol as a series 
of records.

It doesn't sound too hard to have something like:

foo   50    hello
moo 235 bye

And have Cobol read the file in and then based on the first field, 
execute a program with the other fields as arguments.

I had skipped over chapters in my books that dealt with Cobol on IBM 
mainframes because, well I don't have a mainframe :)

After reading one today, it sounds like people invented the scripting 
language I was considering long ago, job control language.

This guy hates JCL:

http://www.mainframes.com/jcl.htm

This sounds like it should be the easiest language to implement, is it 
really inconsistent and weird?  How could something so simple have gone 
wrong.


Would JCL or something like it be good for open Cobol ?

-Patrick