Given that improvement rarely comes without disruption... I think IBM could provide a new and improved SAVEX macro. Customers would be able to choose if and when they want to use the new interface. IBM could recommend deprecating use of the old SAVE macro. This would not prevent or might imply that IBM intends to discontinue the SAVE macro at some future date.
Of course, there are customers like me, who rarely used IBM's SAVE macro, because they wrote their own. Don > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] > On Behalf Of John Eells > Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 9:18 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: SAVE macro > > 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
