IBM Mainframe Forum

Well, if this is a silly question, at least it may provide some entertainment value. (The title of the topic necessarily sounds like an existential quandary.)

If I have a CLIST created under ISPF as aaaaa.bbbbb.cccc(clname) is there any way that the clist knows it is clname (or aaaaa.bbbbb.cccc(clname))? I have tried what seem to be all the system variables, such as &SYSICMD, &SYSPCMD, etc., at the very beginning of the code, and none of them appear to list anything that resembles the name. For now, I have had to code the name of the clist as a variable within the code, but it would be nice to have it assignable dynamically. Thanks.

That's why people now use REXX...

So, does a REXX procedure know its own name?

Yes; it is the third token gotten from PARSE SOURCE.

Interesting, although I am not looking forward to converting these CLISTs to REXX. The lack of a GOTO means a complete rewrite (and no, I don't think the elimination of GOTO really helps.) most of our users are also accustomed to entering a small bit of input at the end of a preformatted line (CLIST's WRITENR), but SAY and PULL in REXX don't quite support this format, at least as far as I can tell. Still, I thank you for the tip.

Rexx is technically a GOTOless language; to the left, the signal instruction will provide the same functionality.

You can also call al little clist to: receive a prompt string from the rexx program, do a writenr, read the response and, finally, store the reponse in an ispf variable for your rexx program to retrieve and process.

Actually, I did consider using a CLIST to display a string of text and get the response, but I did not have any luck in getting it back to the REXX. I am not really familiar with VPUT/VGET. It seems strange that user input is one area where CLISTs have a slight edge (although hardly very elegant in any case).

If it were simply a Y or N response, I suppose I could use one of the system variables that allow setting, but I would need to hold up to 8 characters of text.

And I was hoping not to go to all the overhead of writing the data to a temporary member just to read it back again. At some point, the trouble eliminates the utility of trying to keep a user from seeing anything different.

Another alternative is to use a panel for interfacing with the user. If you have the rexx toolkit installed you can use CHAROUT to issue a prompt - it does not issue a carriage return.
For the CLIST solution I have/had a working test program which is where I got the information.

If you just need a dynamic 1-line prompt with response, then this may be used. Clearly not as simple as the CLIST WRITENR, but at least you can use the same panel for different prompts.
Save this panel as AREA1:

Use as in this REXX snippet: