开云体育

Both RPF and RFE are imitating the style of an IBM program product introduced in the 1970's called Structured Programming Facility (SPF).? (Later, they changed the acronym to mean System Productivity Facility and finally Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF).)? The idea behind the design was that a software development department might have datasets of a given type with names like these:
DEPT58.PROD.ASM
DEPT58.TESTING.ASM
DEPT58.DEVEL.ASM

Thus, if a programmer needed to edit member MYSUB1 from one of those datasets he would enter
PROJECT ===> DEPT58
LIBRARY ===> DEVEL??????? ===> TESTING?????? ===> PROD
TYPE??? ===> ASM
MEMBER? ===> MYSUB1

The datsets would effectively get concatenated together and member MYSUB1 would be retrieved from the first dataset where it was found.? When the programmer backed out of the edit session it would be saved in the first dataset of the concatenation, DEVEL in this case.

If you needed to work with a dataset that had more than 3 qualifiers you would have to type its name in the OTHER DATA SET NAME field, except there you would enter it in "TSO convention style".? That is, if the high-level qualifier was the same as the PREFIX set in your TSO profile (usually your userid), you would enter the 2-n qualifiers without quotes and the system would prefix your PREFIX onto the name.? If the HLQ was different from your PREFIX you would enter the full dataset name with single quotes around it.

MVS with SPF/ISPF was my primary operating system from about 1980 to 1998.? We rarely used the LIBRARY concatenation feature of ISPF because the datasets we dealt with rarely followed its assumed naming convention.? Usually the "production" dataset had a system or department HLQ and our sandbox dataset had our userid as the HLQ, but ISPF only allowed you to vary the 2nd HLQ (LIBRARY) not the 1st HLQ (PROJECT).

Both RPF and RFE have added their own enhancements and variations on the original SPF paradigm.

Charles Bailey