[Info-vax] Does OpenVMS Use Unicode?

[John E. Malmberg]

On 6/12/2016 8:58 PM, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com wrote:
>
> So, did OpenVMS deal with any of this?

VMS ODS-5 stores Unicode in UCS-2 internally and uses its own VTF-7 
encoding to access it as ASCII characters.

This is used in the Pathworks/Advanced Server product and some other 
products used this encoding.

Until VMS 8.4, the VMS C library did not support translating ODS-2 UCS-2 
format filenames to or from UTF-8 Unix format names.

That support is turned on via a decc$ feature.  Decc$ features can be 
set via logical names or by a C callable API in programmers.

Until that support was added, the VMS C library could only handle UCS-2 
through VTF-7 encoded filenames.

Now even though the CRTL did not support UCS-2, because ODS-5 can store 
any binary character, the CRTL did inadvertently (and undocumented) 
start supporting UTF-8 when ODS-5 support was added.

This was not discovered until people tried moving from the discontinued 
Pathworks product to CIFS, as VTF-7 encoded UCS-2 was not visible to 
CIFS and I do not know how UTF-8 encoded filenames showed up to 
Pathworks if at all.

How VSI is going to handle these issues, I do not know.  It probably 
will depend on customer feedback.

Regards,
-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net_work