[Info-vax] Does OpenVMS Use Unicode?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-06-13 01:58:12 +0000, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com said:

> Unicode...
> So, did OpenVMS deal with any of this?

OpenVMS has effectively ignored most any character encoding development 
past ISO Latin-1, which is very close to DEC MCS.   There's 
character-escaped support for UCS-2 and VTF-7 in the file system naming 
(see the ^UP, et al, not that there's a whole lot of documentation on 
that or on VTF-7), but no UTF-8 support in anything that particularly 
matters in the user interface and tools, and the command line support 
is a morass of escapes.

Certainly OpenVMS has the tools — bytes — and some old versions of 
libraries — iconv — and the two different versions of CDA converter 
libraries around, support for wide characters in C (but no C99 or C11 
library calls), and you can port and/or roll your own Unicode support, 
if you need anything past DEC MCS.  But anything like the integrated 
UTF-8 support in bash that's available on some platforms, or tools that 
deal with converting files and strings with common formats, is not part 
of DCL or the libraries and frameworks.

String descriptors — a very primitive and limited form of an object — 
lacks any sort of character encoding tag, and the file system similarly 
lacks encoding-related metadata mechanisms.

Escapes and FIDing and DIDing and ^UP and the rest are what you get 
when compatibility — the past — wins out over the future, but that's 
what customers with legacy applications want.


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