Yesterday…completing 2 basic MVS COBOL programs, was very satisfying. I’ve done a fair amount of DOS COBOL, admittedly many years ago, and other than the SELECT statement’s in the ENVIRONMENT DIVISION it’s very similar. After I had 95% convinced myself that IEBGENER was the correct program to load my virtual tape to a MVS DASD dataset, then I only had to concentrate on the JCL and operator messages and not the program. If I had started trying to use MVS COBOL to go tape to disk, if something didn’t work…I would have continuously questioned myself…is the JCL wrong or is the program wrong…or both? Once I was successful with IEBGENER, I basically knew I had the correct JCL and only had to worry about getting COBOL to work with the JCL. And bonus, by using IEBGENER to go tape to disk, I had successfully created 2 different (tape and disk) valid JCL DD definitions. Then I was free to concentrate on the COBOL program!