Rob Schramm wrote: <begin extract> Considering how data is growing, don't these limitations seem a bit arbitrary? 2**32 or 2**40? <end extract>
I suspect that the OP's 2**32 should be, more precisely, 2**32 - 1, i.e., the capacity of an unsigned fullword. (Where 2**40 comes from is not so clear, since the one speculation about it that occurs to me is almost insulting to the OP I will not set it out here.) Arbitrary limits are always odorous, but the problem of control-block field overflow is not going to go away, and for that reason the maxima o 2**63 - 1 = 9.224 x 10**18, for a signed DW counter, or o 2**64 - 1 = 1.845 x 10**19, for an unsigned DW counter are likely to be upper bounds on many counts for the foreseeable future. Such upper bounds should be much larger than life when they are conceived; and these are, for now at least. Questions like 'Who would use a file name 1024 characters in length?' are thus misconceived. --jg ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
