I believe John Gilmore meant that the original S/360 architects thought that the system should support at least five levels in a file name and that each level could be as long as eight bytes. I suspect that this value of eight came from the maximum length of a PDS member name, also eight. This suspicion is heightened by the fact that the system structure holding PDS member name entries, namely a PDS directory block on DASD with key length 8 and block size 256, had the same characteristics as that of the original system structure holding cataloged data set name entries, namely a SYSCTLG data set with key length 8 and block size 256. The same channel program could be used to find a catalog block containing a given data set name or a PDS directory block with a given PDS member name. And the same code could be used to update one of such blocks (either add a new entry into a block with possible cascading effects for each subsequent block in the catalog or directory or delete an entry from one such block) once the channel program had located the proper block to be updated. Bill Fairchild Franklin, TN
----- Original Message ----- From: "Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)" <shmuel+ibm-m...@patriot.net> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Sent: Friday, November 29, 2013 4:05:19 PM Subject: Re: z/OS is antique WAS: Aging Sysprogs = Aging Farmers In <cae1xxdesuckurytxfugpi7kz3fzsap2np4xcuk+1tavy93g...@mail.gmail.com>, on 11/29/2013 at 02:16 PM, John Gilmore <jwgli...@gmail.com> said: >Under OS/360 the notional, antetypical 'longest' index had the syntax ><level1>.<level2>.<level3>.<level4>.<level5> I can't speak for release 1, but certainly in OS/360 R14 there was no such limit. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html> We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress. (S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
