SAY Statement

Purpose

Use the SAY statement to write a line of text to the operator's console during initialization.

How to Specify

Include as many statements as needed; they are optional. You can place SAY statements anywhere in the system configuration file.

Operands

token: is the text to be displayed. Because the token is not delimited by quotation marks, it will be converted to upper case when it is displayed.
'string'
"string": is the text to be displayed. The text inside the quotation marks is not converted to upper case. The string is displayed unchanged and without the delimiting quotation marks.

Usage Notes

Multiple blanks not within quotation marks are compressed to a single blank.
Multiple blanks within quotation marks are not compressed.
Variable substitution does not occur for any token specified on the SAY statement.
A SAY statement that contains no text will cause a blank line to be displayed.
Use two consecutive double quotation marks ("") to represent a " character within a string delimited by double quotation marks. Similarly, use two consecutive single quotation marks ('') to represent a ' character within a string delimited by single quotation marks.
Each SAY statement shows up as a message on the operator's console. The messages are not displayed as they are encountered. These, as well as all the other initialization messages, are queued in storage until the operator is autologged.
Messages that display the SAY statement text will also appear in a spooled console listing from the IPL. Use an appropriate text length on your SAY statements to ensure the entire text is captured in the spooled console file.
The text limit for a SAY statement is approximately 1900 characters. This is the maximum amount of data that will be displayed at the operator's console. For data written to a console file, the existing limit is 299 characters. Because the logical record length of a console file is 132, also note that any data placed in a console file may be arbitrarily split into multiple lines.

Examples

If your system configuration file contains the following:

      SAY 'at line 100, a test of SAY:'
      SAY "Reading file" -system- config
      SAY
      SAY 'Here''s my     test'    a b         c
      SAY
      SAY "Here''s another test"

Your operator would see:

      HCPZPQ2780I At line 100, a test of SAY:
      HCPZPQ2780I Reading file -SYSTEM- CONFIG
      HCPZPQ2780I
      HCPZPQ2780I Here's my     test A B C
      HCPZPQ2780I
      HCPZPQ2780I Here''s another test