As it happens (in my personal view) I agree with you, Tom. But I also agree that IBM should focus first on what its current and prospective customers want. In the fullest meaning of "want." That is, I agree with the late Steve Jobs that customers often don't know what they want in large part because they don't know all that's technically possible in the future.
I remember a school of thought that "thunking" might not have been a good idea because it encouraged developers to do what they do best: nothing. :-) That is, developers would use thunking as a means to achieve the bare minimum for a too-timid leap to the next addressing width when what they really should have done (for their customers' and end users' benefit) is brought their whole product/program over to the new width -- or at least continued their efforts in subsequent releases to complete the move to the next width. I don't know if I'd agree with that school of thought, but I remember it, and there's a certain logic to it. I wonder if thunking is an area a third party and/or the open source community would find interesting -- a standard set of callable thunking services. And I wonder if it'd be technically possible as such, and how difficult. Again, in my personal view, I think I'd be mostly satisfied having the popular application environments (CICS TS, IMS TM, WAS, etc.) encouraging reasonably free, ad hoc run-time intermixing of 31-bit and 64-bit programs that interact with each other in myriad ways. That seems to have already happened in several use cases. For example, recent releases of CICS TS support 64-bit Java programs interacting with 31-bit programs written in other languages via all the popular CICS services (COMMAREAs, containers, EXEC CICS LINK, etc.) The 64-bit storage evolution (e.g. containers) has been good, too. I also really like the upcoming COMMAREA/container evolution feature in CICS TS 5.2 (now in open beta) since that's of a similar theme. All good stuff (and only some of the examples). Maybe a bit too orderly and methodical for my occasionally radical nature -- I joke, mostly -- but then again these are often mission-critical applications. Anyway, as always, tell IBM what you want, why, when, and preferably via the right channels. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, zEnterprise Industry Solutions, AP/GCG/MEA E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
