On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 17:30:20 -0300, Clark Morris wrote: > >This brings up a very interesting question, how much of z/OS is now >constrained to very low limits for historical reasons and the >difficulty of change. 8 character ids (job, user, etc.), 2 levels of >stepname, 44 character datanames and 8 character member name come to >mind. > Amen.
> Managing transitions is >never easy and I hope someone has been looking at this and not taking >the shortsighted view that was done with regard to FBA. There are >many limitations in z/OS that make it look antiquated and ill thought >when compared to other platforms. Limitations that made sense on >2314s and 256K OS360 are increasingly archaic. > There has been some discussion on this list of the possibility of FBA for z/OS UNIX filesystems, possibly a successor to zFS (perhaps the other ZFS). And for many years, the UNIX filesystems have supported QSAM and BSAM GET/PUT/READ/WRITE, and more recently BPAM read only; a sort of back emulation -- Classic emulated under UNIX emulated under Classic. Suppose the loop were shortcut -- a more faithful Classic emulation in a UNIX filesystem implemented directly on an FBA device. I can imagine: //SYSUT1 DD PATH='/relatively/unrestricted/pathname',FILEDATA=CLASSIC, where "CLASSIC" would specify the full emulation of Classic behavior under a UNIX filesystem, with the name limitations removed. The adaptation of applications could be evolutionary. For example, HLASM used to report for UNIX files, "PATH.NAME.SPECIFIED", as many applications still do. I suspect this what the service to extract a data set name returns for a DDNAME allocated to a UNIX file. The latest version of HLASM now shows the correct pathname, but for the interim compatibility was available with some limitation of function. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
