Charles' interpretation is exactly the use case we are concerned with. The 
doc is not ASCII-oriented. It is EBCDIC-oriented. That use case, 
analogously, is why we continue to update CVTPRODN with a value that is 
not necessarily "obvious" but has the necessary characteristic of 
increasing (we even found that, for compatibility, we had to maintain the 
format of SPx.y.z).

At the minimum, the &SYSLRACF doc will have to be changed. It clearly no 
longer is the RACF level). The comment on RCVTVRMN (which is documented 
properly as the source for &SYSLRACF) describes this situation. In all 
supported releases (and started in z/OS 2.2), there is no reason to use 
&SYSLRACF because it is known to correspond to the z/OS release (although 
that comment should refer to the ECVT not CVT). If someone is simply 
displaying &SYSLRACF, there is no benefit to doing so. You should display 
the value that is provided in ECVTPNAM / ECVTPVER / ECVTPREL / ECVTPMOD.

But what I don't know is if there is some REXX sysvar that surfaces that 
ECVT info. Without that, the functionality is lacking.
With a more complicated approach, a REXX exec can get that information 
from the ECVT but that doesn't strike me as "nice".

We might explore "unfreezing" this in a way that keeps the value 
increasing for comparison purposes.

Peter Relson
z/OS Core Technology Design


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