>Hypothetically, this would introduce the possibility of a new error mode: >buffer overflow. I would hope that I would hope that such an error >would be reported in the completion status of the hypothetical >symbol resolution facility.
There already is such an indication. Return code 8 from ASASYMBM indicates that there is not enough room in the target buffer for the substituted result. That can occur, today, only if an exploiter provides their own symbol table (whether in conjunction with system symbols or not) and that symbol table does not limit symbol value length to the symbol name length. The system will put into the buffer as much as fits. It is likely that return information would be provided to indicate "how big would I have had to make the target buffer in order to have had room". >Adding a new interface while retaining the old one. That is not a choice that helps the preponderance of cases that exist today. Changing to use a new interface is precisely what contributes to the potentially large number of lines of code to be changed. And changing to do something useful when "full" is costlier still. That is why I did not list it as a choice. Providing an approach that would overcome the fixed-length record length (such as for JCL or parmlib member reads) or the 126-byte command length limitation is not likely to happen. At best I could envision "reject entirely". It is possible that we could consider a message in some of these cases (when there is a common point that the detection would occur), but since we would not be likely to implement a confirming WTOR "truncation occurred, do you want to continue" (in part because there might not be anyone around to react to such a WTOR), a message would therefore indicate "truncation occurred, we used the truncated result, we hope that that use did not cause trouble, change and try again if you don't like what happened". 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
