Gil, what’s your point? CMS an OS that has an 8.8.1 non-hierarchical file system though legacy APIs. A new set of APIs that provide access to a POSIX file system in which legacy files can be referenced (//fn.ft.fm) was added.
#include <stdio.h> works just fine. And in 40 years of writing programs on CMS, I’ve never been stymied by 26 file mode letters. (Being able to have multiple disks or directories accessed via union on a single file mode letter would be useful.) Rewriting CMS to have a different OS was not an option. Or desirable. Regards, Alan Altmark IBM > On Sep 20, 2020, at 9:47 PM, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> >> On 2020-09-20, at 16:44:40, Rob van der Heij wrote: >> >>> On Mon, 21 Sep 2020 at 00:07, Alan Altmark wrote: >>> >>> Where I think it suffered the most is the inability to ACCESS a BFS >>> directory like you access an SFS directory, with all that implies. But >>> being able to jump into and out of the shell or to use the OPENVM command >>> mitigates that to an extent. >>> > And all the limitations that implies: > o It conceals the hierarchic nature of BFS/SFS -- > there's nothing like FN FT FM/dir1/dir2 to get at > directories under FM. > o It limits the BFS namespace to the CMS 8.8.1 convention. > (At least it's better than the obsolete 8.3.) And the > character set is limited -- think "#include <stdio.h> > o Drive letter exaustion. The VMLINK EXEC that does a > LINk/ACCESS/run program/RELEASE/DETACH is a desperate > circumvention. I've long thought that namespace could > immediately be doubled by allowing both uppercase and > lowercase drive letters. > >> You have pipeline stages to list the BFS directory and to read and write >> files in your BFS file space. I don't think it would take you too much >> effort to write something similar to the typical "explorer" type user >> interface. >> > Would that deal with classic (pre-Pipelines) utilities such as ASSEMBLE > with SYSIN identified with a BFS file and SYSLIB identified with a > concatenation of BFS, SFS, and MDFS directories? HLASM (ASMA90) > on z/OS nicely handles a concatenation of zFS, PDSE, and PDS directories > using allocation (like FILEDEF, only more general). > > -- gil >
