Joel C. Ewing wrote: <snip>
I would contend that the length of time a behavior has been in place doesn't really count if the bad consequences of that behavior have only recently been revealed.
<snip>
The problem with changing really old behaviors like this one is that people are often relying on them whether they know it or not. There is some disruption to leaving them as-is, and some disruption to changing things so they are more intuitive or work better in some way not expected to be visible. Neither is easy to quantify in advance, but historically we have sometimes guessed spectacularly wrong when favoring the latter.
This makes us terribly gunshy and reluctant to change long-stable interfaces even if we would design them differently were we able to go back in time and change them. The case for doing so must be very strong. Creating a new interface that behaves as we would wish is far safer.
-- John Eells z/OS Technical Marketing IBM Poughkeepsie [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
