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

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Stephen Hoffman skrev den 2015-01-25 18:15:
> 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.
>
>

We are actualy using 7-bit sw/fi char set in the applications,
so there is not even any [] characters at all... :-)

I thought of "modernizing" this to DEC-MCS (ISO-8859-1) but it
would be quite a lot of work...

Jan-Erik.