John, Although I could wish that the change I have proposed could be implemented in a relatively short term, I think that realistically, if it is accepted by IBM, it can most likely be expected to appear at a release boundary.
That being said, I will venture a prediction that baseless programming will not be widely adopted until mechanisms are put in place to limit the cost of re-engineering code to make use of baseless programming. John P. Baker -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of john gilmore Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2010 2:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: LARL vs. literal alignment We must all make our own economic tradeoffs, and I shall not try to second-guess this one. I will, however, venture to make a further generic observation. Changes in the workings of the HLASM can seldom be made quickly, by next week's PTF say. They must be considered carefully, costed, and laddered among other such undertakings; and in an OCO environment we outside IBM cannot help much in doing this. When their turn comes they must then be designed, implemented, and tested; and finally they must be documented and, usually, packaged up in the next new release rather than an emergency PTF. All this takes an interval of time measured in [a good many] months; and for this reason alone such changes, while worth pursuing in many cases, almost never provide solutions to anyone's proximate, short-term problems. John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
