[Info-vax] ODS-5 specifications, was: Re: Does OpenVMS Use Unicode?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2016-06-13, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
> On 2016-06-13 14:26:14 +0000, hb said:
>
>> On 06/13/2016 02:37 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>> 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.

Talking about documentation, did the fine details of the ODS-5 on disk
changes ever make it into any public documentation other than that
available in header files present in a VMS distribution ?

For ODS-2 there's McCoy which is a public book you can freely obtain
but there's nothing similar for the ODS-5 updates which I've ever
been able to find.

>> 
>> Did you mean "^U" instead of "^UP"? The first escape sequence is for 
>> UC2-2, the latter is for specifying Posix path-/filenames in DCL, and 
>> for that it requires another '^' and quoting:
>> 
>> $ dir "^UP^./login.com"
>> "^UP^./LOGIN.COM"
>> 
>> Total of 1 file.
>> $
>
>
> I rest my case.
>

There are some things I disagree with you about and there are some
things I agree with you about. The above strongly falls into the
latter category; the ODS-5 escaping rules are way too complex.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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