On Tue, 30 May 2023, at 21:41, Seymour J Metz wrote: > SMP/E uses VSAM I've no idea if that is or was correct
> and doesn't have the wonky member names of SMP through SMP4. You keep saying this ... and you're still wrong. I don't know why you're so sure. Maybe it's changed since then (sometime between 1985 and 2000 or so, I expect). I only ever used SMP/E, and wonky member names did exist in one (at least) of the PDSes it used to store stuff. I seem to remember also that the PDS I found them in had a vast number of members in it - can't recall just how many that was though. Last time we discussed this (around 09 APRIL this year) I guessed which PDS it might have been - and was probably wrong. Someone else said they thought it was perhaps the SMPSCDS. I've just run a search of my PC copies of some old mainframe notes, JCL etc, looking for "SMPSCDS" and I found a reference to this exact issue inside the transcript of a discussion I had with IBM support (from, I think, the year 2000), when we were using os390 2.6 ... though that's not the os in which I first noticed the weird member names). The discussion was on the wider issue of poor documentation of just exactly which characters were valid in datasetnames. For example I'd found it was psossible to create dsnames with dashes / minus signs / hyphens in their qualifiers. IBM said it was impossible. It wasn't - I'd successfully created MYHLQ.TEST-- via ispf option 3.2 and also MYHLQ.TEST- in JCL, without having single quotes around those dsnames. Another character one could get into a qualifier was the left curly bracket (of course those are in some SVC member names) and perhaps the code that allowed those in ispf accidentally allowed them in qualifiers as well. I can't remember. The conversation then moved on to implications of not being able to SMS-manage datasets whose names didn't meet the tighter rules that SMS used. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
