Hello List,
The MVS (et al) Binder and program objects have been around for over 30 years. It is possible to have aliases for program objects (stored in a PDSE) that are longer than 8 characters. However, I have not found any facilities to (1) bringing thus-named things into storage and (2) list them. The ATTACH[X], LINK[X] and LOAD macros all allow you to specify an 8-byte name (using the EP= or EPLOC= parameters), or a 62-byte area returned from BLDL (the DE= parameter) but that area also only has an 8-byte name part (and BLDL can only find 8-bytes names anyway). There are USS (OMVS) facilities to load program objects (loadhfs and loadhfs extended) but they can only be used to load a program object from an HFS file, not a PDSE. ISPF member lists only have an 8-byte area for member or alias names. The documented facilities for reading a PDS or PDSE directory (simulated in the PDSE case) only allow you to read a 'traditional' 8-byte name (and the TTRC, and up to 62 bytes of user data). If an alias name is longer than 8 bytes, is it skipped or truncated? Truncation could possibly lead to duplicate name being seen which could cause all sort of problems. It appears that the binder INCLUDE statement can handle a long alias name (I haven't tested this so I can't be sure). Have I missed something or is it not possible to bring into storage longer than 8-byte aliases from a PDSE? I would love someone to point me to other facilities that I am not aware of. Peter Morrison
