To begin with a kudos, Ted MacNeil wrote:
<begin snippet>
Especially with the requirements for backwards compatability (sic) it will not
spring forward as Athena from the forehead of Zeus.
</end snippet>
and I want to acknowledge that he got this classical allusion right. His
spelling of of the word 'compatibility' and his use of the word 'forehead'
instead of 'brow', the traditional translation, do a little take the edge off
his achievement; but he is clearly making progress.
There is no real difficulty about 1) writing AMODE(64) code or 2) about putting
this code above the bar. The very real difficulty is that it cannot yet be
executed there 'in general' under z/OS, as Chris Craddock has already made
clear.
The current chief use of AMODE(64) is thus to access data above the bar from
code located below it, but the importance of this use must not be
underestimated: DB2 now makes crucial use of space above the bar for its
tables, and there are applications that could and should do so too.
The baleful ignorance of AMODE(64) implicit in many of the posts to this thread
suggests that this will not happen soon; and this was entirely predictable:
reactionary, pathologically risk-averse institutional behavior is
characteristic--I had almost written the defining characteristic--of many
mainframe shops.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
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