On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:51:43 -0600, Patrick O'Keefe wrote:
>On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:42:44 +0200, Itschak Mugzach wrote:
>
>>I RTFMed before asking, but it looked strange to me that the length
>>of the variable value is forced by the length of the variable name...
>>...
>
>I think the logic was to prevent JCL errors when symbols were expanded.
>Whether or not that is correct, it is a very frustrating limitation.
>
Indeed. And a singularly ill-motivated rule; it falls far
shy of its purpose. Consider:
//SYSUT1 DD DISP=SHR,DSN=SYS1&WOMBAT.SAMPLIB
... which succeeds for SYMDEF(&WOMBAT='.')
but fails with JCL error for SYMDEF(&WOMBAT='XYZZY').
All it guarantees is that some parsers may omit checks for
buffer overflows.
-- gil
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