Variable naming convention

Variables are tokens within the command statements that are to be replaced with actual values immediately before the statement is run.

A variable name begins with a prefix character, which is usually an exclamation mark (!) to avoid conflicts with IBM Z Workload Scheduler variable substitution (but this can be changed), and an optional termination character of a period (.). The variable name must start with an alphabetic character, then it can consist of characters A-Z, 0-9, @, #, _ and the special characters £ and $. The special characters can be modified by using the OPTIONS VARNAMES statement. The name can be any length. However, if the variables you create in Workload Automation Programming Language are also to be stored in the IBM Z Workload Scheduler JCL Variable Tables, their names must also conform to the JCL Variable naming convention.