On Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:50:02 -0800, Edward Jaffe wrote: > >I suspect that the ADDUSER, ALTUSER and PASSWORD commands relied upon >the default behavior of TSO/E parsing services to uppercase the password >values. Likewise, the ISPF panels likely relied on the default behavior >of input fields (CAPS(ON)) to uppercase the password values. > So, rather than update the obsolescent ADDUSER, ALTUSER, and PASSWORD commands, someone made the misguided decision to introduce a supposedly offseting bogosity in numerous other places in the system? Couldn't they have introduced folding in RACF at that point? A cleverer implementation might have omitted the PARMLIB (or whatever) option and left it up to the user: if the user enters an uppercase only password, set a flag in the RACF segment to select folding in RACROUTE. Or, even, if verification fails as-is, fold ant try again.
>Remember, in the old days, everything was uppercase. Nobody wanted to >see or deal with lowercase. There was even a blue toggle switch on the >front of the 3278s to fold the characters displayed on the screen! > Too often, IBM's problem is that they expect the "old days" to last forever, and when the new order appears on the horizon (in this case, mixed-case input devices) make design choices to impede rather than facilitate their use. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
