Subject: SNA Service Transaction Names

From: "John E. Fetvedt (919-254-4366)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 95 08:31:02 EST

Tom,

     Yes, we thought about the possibility of a transaction program name
starting with a single quote, but we feel that is very unlikely.  In fact,
I've only ever seen one that had a single quote in it anywhere. It was
"o'clock", used to set the hardware clock on a very old PC card before
clocks became standard features.  So, while it is possible, we frankly
don't think it will be a problem.

     A major problem I see with the Novell proposal is that it still has
"unprintable" characters in the start of the name.  Yes, it avoids the
overlap between ASCII and EBCDIC representations, but it doesn't address
the problem of how to specify the name in the application.  The name most
likely is specified in the application as either a literal or a constant,
and in many of the languages supported by CPI-C, it is not easy to define
a literal or constant that has both hex and character components.

     Based on this, we still believe that the original proposal is the
better of the two.

     Cheers.

John Fetvedt