Re: uses for long object names

(Replies embedded below.)

> 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.

Name each data area exactly the same as the each message queue it represents; use a text description for each data area something like TEXT('Logical lock for XXXXXXXXXX *MSGQ')

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.

The ADDJOBSCDE command supports a TEXT description. From the WRKJOBSCDE panel, press F11 twice to see text descriptions displayed next to the names on the work-with list.

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.

Even Windows XP still suffers from confusion where sometimes it wants to use short names, e.g.: "PROGRA~1" :-o