Re: uses for long object names

Steve Richter wrote:

recently I had to lock various message queues in a way that did not
interfere with the operation of the message queue. I used data areas for
this purpose. What name to assign to these dtaaras? Ideally, the name would
have been the name of the message queue with the word "lock" concatenated to
the end. Could not do that because of the 10 char name limit. This sort of
scenario comes up quite frequently, where you want the object name to be a
readable extenstion of a core object.

I might consider giving them the same names. *Dtaaras and *msgqs can have the same names. Or, generating names such as LOCK000001, LOCK000002, etc., and using the TEXT() for description, or...

Regardless, I do agree that names should be whatever we'd like them to be. I'm not fanatical about it either way.

another example is the job scheduler. long readable names would be great
there. All the billing end of day jobs could have meaningful names that
describe not only what what the job does, but how it relates to other
jobs running on the system.

(Minor note... A *CMD interface can often provide plenty of extra info.)

I dont see why long object names would have to break any existing apps. do
what windows95 did. have two names for an object. a short, legacy name. and
a long readable one. When a long name is given, the system automatically
assigns a unique short name.

I can imagine that it wouldn't have to _break_ any apps. But I can also imagine that a number of kinds of apps would become troublesome. Almost every app that today displayed (or printed) any kind of object name might need to be modified to allow additional long-name columns. Many would need significant rework because the long-name could necessarily become the important name.

Of course, I won't be surprised if someone can think of a true obstacle. None come to mind for me off the top of my head.

Personally, I liked how OS/2 seemed to do it. The "name" wasn't nearly as important as the object-identifier, which pretty much was only exposed in the registry files. (I'm probably misremembering some of that by now.)

Windows started doing similar in W2K, I think. Makes short-cuts work much better; far less "Searching...".

As long as short-names continued working, some kind of name-translation object should be able to handle it all behind the scenes. We could still give exactly the same names as we do now and use them as we do now; but we could use new interfaces as soon as they were created. Only the interfaces that actually requested long-names would need the translation object.

Assuming we cared enough to ask in large numbers for it. I'm not sure many care more than I do, which isn't a lot.

Tom Liotta