RE: Will IBM ever expand system object names?

I came from a System/3/34/36 background. We only had six characters for
file and field names. We did weird things, which I will not go into here,
when we applied names. I never did much work in RPG/400 so I do not
remember if it had 10-character capability, but the capability was nice
(subjectively) in ILE RPG.

Correct me if I am wrong (often the case), but field names, etc., are merely
symbols. That is, the program, when compiled, uses them to address a memory
location. When local field names in procedures came along, I just guessed
that Barbara somehow indexed those to keep things from getting messy.
Undoubtedly more complex than that.

Back in the day I worked in Cobol, as well as RPG II. We had, if memory
serves, 30-character field names. Most programmers eschewed them usually
using 6-10. I was one of the rare ones that sometimes had to abbreviate
just to get a self-explanatory name in the field limit!

Jerry C. Adams
Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now. -Steven Wright
IBM i Programmer/Analyst
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NMM&D
615-585-2175


-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
James H. H. Lampert via MIDRANGE-L
Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2024 10:28 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Cc: James H. H. Lampert
Subject: Re: Will IBM ever expand system object names?

There's also another issue.

Long filenames, and allowing spaces in filenames, are primarily
creatures of the GUI. They work great in Mac OS, and WinDoze, and in the
Gnome and KDE GUIs for Linux, but not so great if you have to open up a
command line in any of those operating systems. If you have a long name
in an OS that is used primarily from a command line, you increase the
amount of typing involved (and the possibility that a typo might cause
some real grief), and if you need command-line access to something with
embedded spaces in the name, it needs to be quoted. I'm sure that most
of us have gotten a taste of that just from long (and space-embedded)
names in the IFS.

--
JHHL