Peter Relson's most recent post seems to me to strike the right note. That the PrOp makes a hardware feature available is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for its availability under an operating system, any operating system. (I know of one old proto-OS that effectively blocked all use of the System/360 SVC facility.)
It is important that anyone who gets into trouble using a facility or technique that IBM has not said it supports not whine about it. Moreover, anyone who does use such a facility has an obligation to do more and more rigorous boundary testing than he might otherwise do. Much depends upon circumstances and judgment. Most statement-level languages, for example, omit to enforce some of the restrictions they impose explicitly. Exploiting such an omissis is, however, unwise. The next version of the language processor involved may well enforce some of them. This seems to be a situation much like the one we are discussing, but it is in fact a very different one. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
