--- On Thu, 9/10/09, Lizette Koehler <stars...@mindspring.com> wrote:
From: Lizette Koehler <stars...@mindspring.com> Subject: Re: CLIST/REXX Library Formats To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu Date: Thursday, September 10, 2009, 4:09 PM I think the Lrecl80 came from the punch card days. The people I worked with back in 1980 preferred the 80 byte record because they came from punch cards. That plus the ease of seeing everything on one screen without having to scroll back and forth was great. But those days were more due to the limits of the terminals. I do not recall when we were able to go from the 24x80 screen to mod3/mod4/mod5. But that would be one reason many prefer the Lrecl80. With the advances of screen szie (162x??) you could see more at one time than before. I really do not think it was ever a standard, just a preference. IBM would ship some products clists (like DB2's) in both formats and you could choose which one you liked to use. My preference is still 80 byte, but I can always adapt to 255. Lizette Liz: IIRC the main issue was IEBUPDTE. It would only support FB 80/ multiples of 80 for the blocksize. It was a major issue (to us) at first because we had specified that clist libraries had to be VB. Somewhere in the 90's (?) IBM fixed the issue but not all of the products have been updated to do so(IIRC). I personally use VB to this day. The only "issue" is that there is an extra step in the install process to change the FB IBM datasets (for Clists) to VB. Someone along time ago put a file on the CBT tape to do this nicely. One of "messy" items in the whole mish mash is that some times a product does not tell you that library x is a clist library and you have to hunt around for them. I just got tire of the whole thing and do the conversion when I am doing the install I think I factored a days worth of work to do this. There are some side issues as you have to keep a lookout for the clist data sets that are updates and you must sort of monitor to see if anything is being affected with the SMP run. I do NOT like to handle the exceptions. I know I discussed with the applications people one day at a meeting about the possibility of going back to FB 80 but they unanimously demanded the VB. Again its a little bit of extra work during install that has to be done. Ed ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
