I have one of those "is there ever any situation when ... would not be a good default" questions, and I need the help of VM-savvy minds capable of perverse and twisted logic. I can't imagine a better place to find them than this list. (Yes, that was intended as a compliment.)
As you all know, DMSCGR and DMSCSR are CSL routines which retrieve and set, respectively, the values of REXX variables. The default behavior is that the variable name passed is searched for directly in REXX's list of variables, exactly as passed. Optionally, the caller can ask that the name be both translated to upper case and that REXX perform variable name substitution on it before looking for it. (Since REXX doesn't care about case in variable names and some quick experiments confirm that passing mixed- or lower-case names without this option isn't productive [except of non-zero return codes], one could reasonably ask why the name is not always translated to upper-case. I think it's a very valid question, but more or less irrelevant to my problem.) In situations where everyone involved knows which behavior is desired, the choice between substitution or not isn't an issue. But if there's a situation where an end user will create REXX execs which pass a variable name to a program which will then retrieve or set it via these routines, it's more problematic ... or maybe not, if one or the other behavior is obviously preferable. Can anyone think of a situation in which you would *not* want substitution performed on the variable name passed? Typically, the whole reason you use compound REXX variables is to get that. But the writers of these routines didn't make that the default, so I want to know if there's some obvious situation we're missing where you wouldn't want it. (We've come up with one exotic case involving REXXVARS, but it's not one that seems likely to occur. In fact, it seems like the writer of the exec would almost have to be out to get you to code it that way.) Thanks, Steve -- Steve Marak -- sama...@gizmoworks.com
