This post is a response to a question that was, I am all but certain, addressed not to me but to another John, John Eells.
z/OS is a large, powerful, and complex operating system. It is heterogeneous too. Some of it has been rearchitected (a barbarous but now inescapable word) to reflect z/Architecture; some, much of it, is yet to be updated; and some, we arfe told, may never be. It is thus full of vermiform appendices, no longer relevant facilities left behind as it evolved that are now perhaps dysfunctional but not crippling. IMBED and REPLICATE are excellent examples. They are today without function. They are indeed mildly dysfunctional. IBM's efforts to shed such facilities always meet with a storm of protest from customer management, which almost never has any very clear idea of what it is protesting about but does know that it is being asked to expend resources 'gratuitously'. Why not let sleeping dogs lie? The real objection to old, usually very old, catalogs containing IMBED and REPLICATE is not that they waste resources in a very small way. It is that they should long since have been replaced by more modern catalog structures and, in organizations dedicated to stasis, have not been. These organizations are reactionary, but they do not wish to be called reactionary, and here some latin is actually useful: 'reactionary' can be replaced by 'laudator temporis acti' or even by the acronym LTI, which is much less offensive restated in what Gibbon called "the decent obscurity of a learned language". Problems of this kind are not of course new. Many of the automobiles, 'horseless carriages', produced in the late nineteenth century in both Europe and North America came equipped with buggy-whip holders. It was pointed out early on that these holders were now dispensable. Internal combustion engines are at best unresponsive to flagellation. Some nevertheless wished to retain them 1) for sentimental reasons or 2) because it would be costly and diversionary to remove them. Topics of this kind arise with some frequency on IBM-MAIN; and they often stir up more interest and participation than substantively important ones, perhaps because they are easier to understand. All this is drôle. What is less so is the spectacle of able men and women crafting careful defenses of the indefensible. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
