[Info-vax] DCL's flaws (both scripting and UI)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-01-25 11:23:03 +0000, Jan-Erik Soderholm said:

> Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) skrev den 2015-01-25 12:06:
>> In article <ma2fue$gsc$1 at news.albasani.net>, Jan-Erik Soderholm
>> <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> writes:
>> 
>>>>>> Right.  You really want the North-American LK layout for VMS.
>>>>> 
>>>>> No, not realy. It is a major mess!
>>>> 
>>>> Maybe impractical (somewhat---I use COMPOSE) for writing Swedish, but
>>>> what's wrong with it for VMS?
>>> 
>>> That it is missing ÅÄÖ and that it is not a proper
>>> "Swedish" layout. Of course...
>> 
>> Right, but with VMS one rarely needs ÅÄÖ etc.
> 
> All our user interfaces (VT-screens) are in Swedish.
> All user/error messages are in Swedish.
> All source code comments are in Swedish (well, a mix today...)
> 
> That is runs on VMS has nothing to do with this.

Phillip is likely referring to the tools, languages and ASCII-based 
applications from ten and twenty years ago, or to the operations with 
the base VMS distro itself, or both.   VMS from a quarter-century ago 
did have language support[1], with add-on Hebrew and the Asian-language 
variants probably being the most widely known and used, though there 
were a number of other languages available back then.

Folks using US English with US English keyboards will probably not see 
very much of any of this, particularly given DCL never saw UTF-8 
support added, and likely few US English sites have made much native 
use[2] of the VTF-7 or more recent UTF-8 support in RMS parsing and 
ODS-5, and support for NCS and related bits was retired, and the C 
iconv and related support is dated at best.

Probably the most recent time that the underpinnings of this old 
internationalization support latent within OpenVMS became visible to 
folks was when the SYS$LANGUAGE logical name was defined and managed to 
blow up HELP /MESSAGE output, IIRC.    The language packages have been 
unavailable for a number of years; no support and no updates.

What you can do in OS X here completely and utterly blows away VMS 
internationalization, in these and in other regards.  UTF-8 support at 
the command line is... invaluable.

#######
[1] These language packages packages were put together, tested and 
supported by the DEC country or regional offices, so even most of the 
engineering folks in Nashua OpenVMS Engineering didn't see all that 
much of them.
[2] Native OpenVMS usage.  Beyond SMB-related services for other 
operating systems, that is.


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