Re: Why does SORT forbid E15+E35 in COBOL for OPTION COPY?

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From: "Farley, Peter x23353" <Peter.Farley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: IBM-MAIN@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wed, March 30, 2011 8:05:38 AM
Subject: Re: Why does SORT forbid E15+E35 in COBOL for OPTION COPY?

SORT provides a rich control card language for record selection and rejection
and other "data processing" operations that I don't have to program. Having the
capabilities of that language between the E15 and E35 exits allows me to take
advantage of those rich capabilities without having to program them myself. As
it stands, I have to perform a useless SORT operation in order to use both
exits, and be careful in specifying the SORT key that I don't disturb the
original order of the records in so doing.

BTW, MODS-type E15 and E35 exits for a JCL-invoked SORT do NOT need to do their
own I/O. SORT passes the records it reads from SORTIN to the E15 exit to
manipulate and the "sorted" or "merged" records to the E35 exit to manipulate.
This lets me take advantage of SORT's superior (i.e., faster) I/O facilities.
Both exits use the "REPLACE" record function to return the manipulated records
to SORT.

In my particular case the exits allow me to decode RECFM=VB records stored on
disk in an application-specific scheme on the way in through the E15 exit,
yielding a fixed-length record easily processed with SORT capabilities, and to
re-code processed records using that application-specific scheme on the way out
in the E35 exit. No COBOL I/O involved.

Peter


Peter:

Yes I agree sort does provide a rich control card combination.
*WAY* back when we had a programmer come up wih an E61 exit. That exit was (IIRC
only supported by IBM & DFSORT). I sat down with him one afternoon trying to
make sense of it and he actually had a valid case. I no longer remember the
specifics but when I talked with SYNCSORT they were surprised to see that we
actually used it. Syncsort was actually interested in it. They were sort of
hinting they wanted to see source but I had no idea where it was. It wasn't
about security it was about the hundreds of places it could have been.

Ed




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