[Info-vax] Does OpenVMS Use Unicode?

[Craig A. Berry]

On 6/12/16 8:58 PM, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com wrote:
> Funny story about Unicode: initially it was going to be a 16-bit
> code, sufficient to cover all the world’s *current* writing systems.
> Then I guess its architects got ambitious, and decided to add in all
> the *historical* writing systems as well. So nowadays it is
> officially a 20-bit code. But who knows how much more it might grow
> in future?

Given that the Unicode geeks originally didn't envision more than three
or four human emotions but now have come to realize there must be a
distinct character for each and every nuanced variant, we'll soon need
64 bits just for the emoticons. I refrain from ending this facetious
paragraph with an emoticon.

> So, did OpenVMS deal with any of this?

That's spelled U+1F4A9, otherwise known as the "pile of poo" character.
VMS pretty much ignored Unicode for a couple of decades. There is some
support for UTF-8 filenames, but it's hard to find documentation for it.
There is an iconv utility and API that provide for some conversions.
There are some wide-character routines in the CRTL, but as you pointed
out in the part of your message I snipped, fixed width characters sets
of any size don't cut it anymore.

I'm not aware of any native libraries or system services that can handle
non-ASCII character data. I'd be quite surprised if the terminal driver
or any native editor could correctly handle characters that are varying
width or have a width greater than 8 bits (but please someone prove me
wrong).

There is decent support in some of the ported languages, e.g., Perl and
Python. I'm less sure about Ruby or Lua, but they likely have facilities
for such things as well.

The current VSI roadmap does not contain the strings "unicode" or "utf,"
so I think this will continue to be a roll your own situation for some time.