Tom Schmidt wrote:
If you limit the long parms to 32K instead of 64K I have little issue, but by raising your limit to unauthorized programs to 64K you create an architectural problem: Old programs loading the "halfword length on a halfword boundary" length value using the LH instruction will receive negative values for such long parameters. They are unlikely to successfully handle such arithmetic values as they would have been very unanticipated when they were written some 30-35 years ago.
If a 32K PARM string isn't long enough I hold out little hope that a 64K
string is going to always satisfy the user's requirements.
I agree on principle. I know for a fact that I have written many, many programs that can handle PARM strings of arbitrary length 0-32767. Unfortunately, I'm certain that *all* of them use the LH instruction to get the length of the string. A staged approach -- 32K now followed by 64K in some later release (as was done for the number of 3390 DASD cylinders) -- would seem prudent.
Having said that, I consider 32K vs 64K to be an issue of minor importance. Considering what parameter strings are used for today, both values appear almost equally to be "conceptual infinity".
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