Whatever happened to: "The results are unpredictable"? (Or: Both bits are yours.)
>> Gone are the days of cowboy sysprogs. > Did they ever exist? You never worked for a vendor? By the nature of the beast, cowboy sysprogs get into more trouble than the other sort and vendor people get to spend a lot of time with them. A good PSR/SE needs the patience of Job apart from technical skills. I guess it's long enough ago to actually name the worst I ever met - Pete Hambar at Nestle in Frankfurt. "Phil - can you come and help? The whole system's running very slowly." "Huh. What have you changed?" "Nothing." When I got there, the 3350 disk drives were wrapped up and standing in the hall. I went in to his office and said: "Whassat?". He said they'd changed DASD to 3380 over the weekend. But - I said - your OS doesn't support 3380. Oh no - they'd gone to a new release. Hmm, said I - I though Adabas x.y didn't support that release. Oh no, we've changed Adabas levels too. Hmm, said I, so you've changed Sort and your COBOL compiler as well? It took a day to find the bad default in Adabas that was forcing every transaction into an overflow file rather than the main database. What worries me in this case is that the kludge might wind up in a product. I made it a point never to mess with the system where I didn't have a defined interface. If z/OS Core Technology Design decides to mess with the way CRs are handled - or some future architecture takes this stuff under the covers ... -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
