>These ojects are easily enough created/manipulated with Assembler, >and Binder can easily create load modules (not only program objects) >with mixed case names. I think it's a dog-in-the-manger attitude for >JCL to prohibit what some (not all) utilities readily support. > >I have always held that syntactic restrictions should be enforced at >the most basic level: if STOW permits the name, higher level >programming interfaces shouldn't prohibit it. If it is the intent of >the design to allow only upper case characters in names, or to make >names case-insensitive, that restriction or behavior should be built >into STOW, not implemented haphazardly, inconsistently, in higher >level interfaces. > >-- gil
Gil, For your first point, I am somewhat more forgiving of JCL not providing support for something that the larger Eco-system it is part of (e.g. ISPF, et al) also does not support :-) And regarding your second point I agree wholeheartedly, unfortunately that ship has well and truly sailed (at least 50 years ago :-) and we need to deal with what is and not what we would wish it to be :-( However neither of your points can overcome the fact that ISPF, most (all?) TSO commands, IBM utilities (e.g. IEBUPDTE, etc.), etc. impose the (arguably artificial and perhaps unfortunate) restriction of not allowing lower case alphabetic characters. I trust you do not dispute that these various development tools have this restriction, irregardless of whether they should or not. And I also trust that you agree that proposing changes to all of these tools fall firmly into the "boiling ocean" category :-) I will take this opportunity to restate my earlier option, to wit, I see no reason why z/OS Unix directory names and lower case characters in PROC/INCLUDE names could not be allowed with minor (trivial?) changes to the Converter. Of course, I would expect this support would follow the existing syntactical rules that obtain in JCL as we know it today. Thus the specific implementation may not be exactly what you had in mind :-) but I don't see any significant impediments to providing the function. Finally, just because I do not rank these items high on my priority list does not have any bearing on where anyone else places them on their priority list :-) John McDowell ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
