Further clarification: Today: If IEASYMxx tries to create a symbol with its value being "too long", it is rejected. Tomorrow: That same definition would be rejected similarly.
There would be a way to indicate "I am creating this symbol and I explicitly want you to let me provide a longer value than the name". Likely that way would be by allowing a character in the symbol name that is not currently allowed, and thus use of that symbol would be an overt, and visual, indication of the new function. For such a symbol, there would still be a maximum but it would not be the length of the symbol name. It is also possible that, like JES symbols in z/OS 2.1, system symbol name lengths may be extended to allow 16 characters rather than 8. The system symbol service ASASYMBM is totally unintelligent. If it sees a symbol, it replaces that symbol with the value. It preserves every character that is not a symbol (including blanks). If you had two blanks after a symbol, you will still have two blanks after the substitution. Thus if you have a symbol value shorter than the name, things after the symbol move to the left. And, if you have a symbol value longer than the name, things move to the right. It is possible that a given exploiter could be given the choice between that approach and the z/OS 2.1 JES approach of trying to preserve the columns where non-blanks appear. I would not expect that choice to be available for a system command and quite possibly not for parmlib reading (those being two places where the system relatively-automatically does symbol substitution). Peter Relson z/OS Core Technology Design ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
