>What is the requirement? Is it to provide for longer values in the
>service or to exploit longer values in, e.g., JCL, PARMLIB? The former
>has utility even if you don't do the latter.

The service has no restriction on the relative lengths of symbol name vs 
symbol value.
An exploiter has always been allowed to create their own symbol table and 
pass in their own symbols with values of their own choosing (I believe the 
symbol value length must be <= 256).

The customer requirements are (for use in such places as commands, JCL, 
parmlib)
- to be able to have longer symbol names than 8  characters;
- to be able to have longer symbol values than symbol names.
  -  For such cases it is OK to truncate silently (both because the users 
of such symbols would know the limitations so would avoid it and because 
they recognize that if they insisted on something better than that they 
might get nothing).

Peter Relson
z/OS Core Technology Design
[email protected] 
     1-845-435-8390            8+295-8390

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