Re: The Day the Music Dies (was: RE: backup spool file)

That's called a "variable length field" on the i5.  People don't use them 
because they weren't available on the S/38 and they refuse to change.
Some might say the extra 2 byte overhead for a variable length field might 
waste $2.73 in disk space and they can't afford that on a measly 6-9 byte 
field.
The fun part would be now adding an offset field to any api data 
structures to support changing this field to variable length.

Rob Berendt
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Group Dekko Services, LLC
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Kendallville, IN 46755
http://www.dekko.com





James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx> 
Sent by: midrange-l-bounces+rob=dekko.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
12/14/2004 03:31 PM
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Re: The Day the Music Dies (was:  RE: backup spool file)






On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Al Barsa wrote:

> You can always make a command parameter bigger.
>
> The problem is what do you do with fields for system output files.  The
> output file for DSPOBJD has three fields, ODCPVR, ODCVRM and ODPVRM 
which
> are all six bytes long.  If you change the length of these fields, this
> will cause logic in programs to break.

And Vern wrote:

> The SYSLVL parameter of RTVOBJD takes a 9-character variable. The format 
is
> VnnRnnMnn. But, as Al says, there are lots of places that use 
6-character
> format - not the least being all the TGTRLS parameters, which are now
> defined as *CHAR-8.

Why use fixed lengths at all?  Make the VRM be a "string" that can be any 
length.  Heck, in linux you can even add your own custom tag to the "VRM" 
(i.e. something like 2.6.9-we_did_this) and all the tools handle it just 
fine.  Why couldn't the iSeries do something similar?

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
                 - billyskank on Groklaw
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