On 11/15/2011 7:38 PM, Bill Fairchild wrote:
I think the real culprit is the lack of user-friendliness in whatever OPEN executor module is blindly following the user's request to overwrite an entire file without checking for certain file types for which overwriting the whole file might not be appropriate. This module, whichever one it is, could easily check if the user is attempting to use any access method other than BPAM to write into a PDS and has not specified a member name, and, if so, then this module should return an error condition. Perhaps IBM reasoned that if a user really, really, seriously wants to do something this strange, they should let him.
IBM was in a big rush to get OS/360 out the door, and may not have considered that worth worrying about. The attitude seems endemic - just look at all the commands handled by the communications task that let the operator set and change things, with absolutely no feedback on the current status.
Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, VT ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
