On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Richard L Peurifoy <[email protected] > wrote:
> On 12/15/2010 3:23 PM, Chris Craddock wrote: > > >> Ok. "Don't do it". It is basically a bad idea. While that field was >> originally intended for "user" (i.e. "customer") use, in practice it is >> unusable. If you want to be able to anchor something globally then you >> should probably use some common storage and create a global name/token >> pair >> to point to it. >> >> > I am curious about this. Do some vendors try to use this field? > If so, I guess we have been lucky in our choice of vendors. > We have used this field to anchor a local "CVT" for over 40 years > and have had no problems. If I were doing it now, I would probably > use name/token, but it wasn't available then. "back in the day..." adventurous folks like Lorne looked at the data areas manuals or fiche and saw "USER area" and thought of interesting things to do with that anchor (there are several scattered around the place). As a result of that, there are probably dozens of examples of naive old-timey vendor products that attempted to use those data areas over the years and as long a nobody else was trying to use the same user words the products worked. But there isn't any protocol or interface for sharing a single word with others who would also like to use it. Heck back then we didn't even really have the concept of an interface. So it rapidly became obvious to most folks that the user words were in fact useless and their exploiters found another way to do what they wanted. Hence my question to Lorne... what are you actually trying to accomplish? -- This email might be from the artist formerly known as CC (or not) You be the judge. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
