John Gilmore wrote:
I must apologize to Tom Marchant.
Things are just as he described them. Moreover, I should have
realized that if things had been otherwise he would not have been
guilty of such an elementary confusion.
The designer of this misbegotten scheme? We must leave her|him to heaven.
There was more than one designer. System symbol support was designed
and written far in advance of the support for indirect catalog entries
that use them, which was designed by another person in a different
system component. The latter made an intelligent choice among the
options in my view, but choosing not to change the format of catalog
entries to expand the volume serial field to 8 characters and allow it
to exceed 6 only when the characters matched the syntax of a system symbol.
But, right or wrong, that's how it happened...
--
John Eells
z/OS Technical Marketing
IBM Poughkeepsie
ee...@us.ibm.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
