Over the past decade there have been several discussions of issues
relating to the size limit for PARM. The basic problems are:
1. The field in the SCT is only 100 characters.
2. While the OS/360 documentation said from day one that any main
program could be used as a subroutine, some programmers assumed
that their parameter lists came from the Initiator and were
limited to a single parameter point to a HW+string that had
at most 100 characters.
3. Some programmers used an EX of an MVC with length-1 into a 100
byte field without checking whether the length exceeded 100 bytes.
While I would argue that the programs mentioned in 2 and 3 are broken,
correcting all of them would be a lot more work then simply identifying
them. Accordingly, I would like to throw a suggestion open for discussion
that I believe will address the various issues that have been raised.
1. Provide something in the SWA that allows the C/I to pass a large
PARM string to the Initiator.
2. Include a table in the C/I containing PARM size limits indexed by
program name.
3. Provide for installation extensions and 3rd party extensions to
the table, preferably driven by PARMLIB.
4. Provide a default of 32 KiB - 1or 64 KiB - 1for programs not in
the table, with a facility for the installation to provide a
smaller default limit.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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