Edward Jaffe wrote <begin snippet> Recently, the need for eight-character TSO userids made it into the list of the highest ranked MVS SHARE requirements. Many installations, driven by their business units, are attempting to standardize on a single, eight-character, cross-platform userid. These attempts are being hampered by the arcane seven-character TSO userid restriction introduced in the 1970s. </end snippet>
This is clearly desirable, but I am not sure that it is enough. Historically, such limitations are almost always traceable to the use of suffixing schemes. Old-style IBM PL/I, for example, limited the lengths of external-procedure names to seven characters in order to make the eighth, rightmost character available for single-character suffixes that identified each of the multiple CSECTs that the compiler generated for that procedure. Or again, I was pleased to discover when I first began to use Stratus VOS that its filenames could be 32 characters in length, but this maximum turned out to be illusory. VOS had the habit of naming backup files using the suffixing scheme <backed-up filename>.bkup so that the 32-character maximum turned out, as a practical matter, to be a 27-character one. Examples of this sort could be multiplied ad infinitum et nauseam. I have concluded that the only way around such infelicities is to make external-name size limitations much larger than life, to chose, say, the value 2^15 - 1 = 32767 characters for them and to make this value a design point even though it is not yet globally usable. Considerable work will have to be done to eliminate the seven-character TSO userid maximum, and it would be a work wasted if an already obsolescent eight-character maximum replaced it. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
