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On 11/05/2010, at 11:25 PM, Lim Hock-Chai wrote:
I wonder if it would be easier for IBM to simply increase the
10-character limit to say 30-char.
Pretty much too late to do that. The costs would outweigh any benefit.
Rochester designed 30 byte names into the MI but chose to expose only
10. That's done for a number of reasons not least of which is the way
database file members are named. They use 20 bytes and the name is a
concatenation of the file name and member name. This would be
difficult to change but presuming a suitable design was devised then
there are all the other things that flow on from a change to something
as fundamental as the size of an object name.
Every object-related command would need to be changed plus associated
help text. Every object-related API would need to be changed. API
documentation would need to be changed. Every display and printer file
that references an external name would need to be changed. Lot's of
internal structures store names rather than pointers and many of these
are 10 byte values because they expect external names (e.g., OIR and
parts of WCB).
Additionally, such changes would have to be done in a backward-
compatible way so existing code doesn't break--extra parameters, new
formats, bunch of stuff.
If this were done then you could expect Rochester to be tied up for at
least an entire release cycle to do only this effort.
Now, if names had originally been designed as varying-length then
perhaps, but that would have required a different approach at the very
beginning and I can see the arguments that might have ensued: 8-
character names are good enough for IBM's flagship mainframes, why
does a pissy little midrange system need more than that? OK, you can
have 10 but no more!
**Anyone notice I'm getting cranky again? Must work on that!
Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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