What is ISPF?

The Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF) is a dialog manager that provides tools to improve program, dialog, and development productivity and control.

The PDF component of ISPF is an integrated work environment used to develop programs, dialogs, and documents. PDF provides an MVS-compatible hierarchical library and many productivity-improving functions. Some examples of these functions are:

ISPF dialog test tools
Full-screen editor, with a dialog interface called edit macros
Multiple update access to data sets
Online tutorials
Data set management
Customized library controls

This document describes the ISPF editor and its dialog interface. A dialog is a program running under ISPF. The interface allows a dialog to access the usual ISPF dialog functions and the ISPF editor functions.