I think "over time" is a key. Things have evolved. Hundredths of a second once seemed like good granularity; now a millisecond is an eternity on a mainframe.
As well as John's parameters, sometimes you want greatest readability and ease of formatting, which leads to packed dates and broken down times. Also, just the simple matter of different teams, with new teams either operating in ignorance of what came before, or saying "we know a better way." Charles -----Original Message----- <snip> >BTW, WHY are there so many formats in the SMF30? Maybe that's what happens >over time. But IIRC John Gilmore once argued that for some record types you want greatest precision; for others greatest range; and for all greatest storage economy. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
