On 12/20/2011 9:24, McKown, John wrote:
So, hopefully, some future version of HLASM will directly support UNIX files. The BPAM support for UNIX seems to be a bit "lacking". I say this because BPAM does support using all possible hex values as a member name, excluding 8x'FF'. SMP/E uses really weird member names successfully. And you can even browse or edit them from ISPF. Hum, since the name in the message is UPPER CASED, perhaps this particular "problem" is due to HLASM after all.
We were just having a discussion hereabouts: we need to upgrade our OPTABLE to exploit some new instructions. But it's highly likely that IBM's new OPTABLE will contain some opcodes, whether we use them or not, that will collide with some of our macro names. IBM has not nicely partitioned the macro name space, IBM/ISV/end user to avoid collisions. At one time, there was a rule of thumb that opcodes were short, and if ISVs and customers used only long macro names, they were pretty safe. That has fallen by the wayside. Opportunity knocks. What if IBM were to commit to using only upper case characters in opcode and macro names, leaving mixed case names the domain of ISVs and customers. Didn't I hear that IBM had to arbitrate a collision between one of its own macro names and one of its own opcodes lately? -- gil
