[Info-vax] Using VMS for a web server

[Paul Sture]

On 2015-06-06, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
> On 2015-06-05 20:49:40 +0000, David Froble said:

>> 
>> Standard names, as in "case sensitive"?  No thanks.
>
> Yes, for folks operating in US ASCII, implementing case insensitivity 
> is easy and can be obvious, and can be easy to implement due both to 
> ASCII and to the way that English works.
>
> Unfortunately, in the wider world and in the Unicode world, this 
> simplicity quickly becomes a whole 'nother mess and a quagmire.   Most 
> folks are pretty quickly using a library — quite possibly a library 
> ported over from Unix — and hoping that the authors got this right.
>
> FWIW, there was a discussion of one of places where case-blindness can 
> bite, with ß / eszett / scharfes S / sharp S, not that long ago, too:
><https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.vms/PeqVjG3Mtxc/NF0shBmiGakJ>

That one was interesting.  We solved a similar problem many moons ago
via a shareable writable image plus associated utility to change the
settings on a per system basis, and that could without too much effort
have been repurposed to do the same on a group basis.  I'm not sure that
would have been the right solution for the compiler problem though.

> Case-sensitive names can be little more than byte comparisons.  Those 
> are much simpler to implement.
>
> As much as you or I might like case insensitivity, there are trade-offs.

I recently came across another little head scratcher in this morass,
where the error message was along the lines of "invalid character for
your locale". Well yes, being Portuguese it was strictly speaking
invalid for my locale, but when you have packages which contain a range
of supported languages, simply throwing errors for filenames which
belong to a different locale isn't really the right thing to do.

-- 
I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I
know it will be called Fortran.                    -- Tony Hoare 1982