Re: [MI400] ACCESS to IFS

["Larry Loen" <lwloen@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>why put them in the IFS in the first place?

In isolation, for any given problem, this is an excellent question.  But,
to speak the obvious, the world is widening.

So, whether it is true for this example or not, one reason for IFS might
be:  "an increasing amount of other, 3rd party software expects a
hierarchical file system."  Especially software ported over from Unix may
have dependencies on related files residing in a /wherever/src when you
have other data residing in directory /wherever.  That kind of dependency
is easily built into C code.

And, this circumstance could be true even in a shop whose own development
environment was strictly RPG and MI.

It is not hard to multply these examples:  some software's desire for
variable length data to be explicitly terminated by CR/LF or just LF, ASCII
requirements, probably others if I thought about it for five minutes.

A lot of the requirements are going to come from the C language, especially
3rd party tools from those who want to run such code on multiple platforms
(as opposed to making such code iSeries specific).



Larry W. Loen  -   Senior Linux, Java, and iSeries Performance Analyst
                          Dept HP4, Rochester MN