Operational Control Language (OCL) is the control language of the IBM System/3, System/32, System/34 and System/36 minicomputer family. It is supported on IBM i's System/36 Environment for backwards compatibility purposes. It is similar to the older control languages JCL (System/370), and unrelated to the later Control Language (System/38 and IBM AS/400), and REXX (AS/400).

Overview

OCL statements are used to directly load user or system programs into memory, assign system resources to them, and transfer system control to them in a process called execution. The fact that a program is stored on a computer's disk drive does not in itself cause the computer to process or execute the program. OCL statements can be entered manually from the keyboard, but are generally stored as a procedure member. A procedure member is a freely editable member within a library, it is a source file. On the S/32, S/34, and S/36, procedures are not compiled, they are interpreted.

Example

OCL statements usually begin with two slashes and at least one space character. Here's an example of a procedure stored on a System/36 as member PROC1: This procedure member incorporates a variety of OCL statements, also procedure control expressions (PCE), resources, that is mostly files are allocated, and several job steps, that is programs are executed. Comments are represented by an asterisk in column 1, and otherwise free-format. Or can be placed after the logical end of a statement, if there is no indicator for statement continuation onto the next line, like a trailing comma.