>>I honestly have no idea if you are agreeing with my position that, >>in the general sense, dataset names are not allowed to contain >>lowercase alphabetic characters or if you are disagreeing with my >>characterization of the restriction as "arguably artificial and >>perhaps unfortunate". > >Neither; I am disagreeing with your characterization of the utilities.
Alright. > >>In regard to your statement that "Those tools that have to deal with >>MVS datasets convert the names to upper case because that is what >>the system requires." I have no idea what you mean by the term "the >>system requires". If you are referring to either catalog processing >>or perhaps SMS I would agree, for other (system) components (e.g. >>allocation (absent SMS), DADSM, access methods (absent VSAM), etc.) >>I would say there is no such requirement. > >I'm referring specifically to the C/I. If TSO commands did not >translate ddname and dsname operands to upper case, there would be >interoperability issues. Resaolving them by saying "The user shopuld >have typed them in upper case." would violate the principle of least >astonishment. > >In principle you could use quoting in apostrophes to suppress UC >translation, but then you would run into catalog issues unless you >also had device and volser parameters to match. Astonishment is in the "eye of the beholder" :-) Or to put it another way, expectations are based upon experience. I would guess that someone with extensive experience of Unix in which CLI does not undergo any transformation is "astonished" when they enter a TSO command such as: alloc dd(input) da(a.b.c) shr and have it be evaluated as if they had entered ALLOC DD(INPUT) DA(A.B.C) SHR. On the other hand the experienced TSO (z/OS) user expects this transformation to occur. I'm sure the putative Unix user is equally astonished with several other features of z/OS :-) If the general conventions/restrictions/characteristics of z/OS were different it would not be z/OS. Or as you have often refrained, "water is wet" :-) In my opinion you and I are pulling on two different ends of the same rope. John McDowell ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
