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

[David Froble]

hb wrote:
> On 06/14/2016 09:05 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> The only documentation I know of are the "header" files. For C: FI5DEF,
> FATDEF and DIRDEF in SYS$SHARE:SYS$LIB_C.TLB - but maybe I'm missing
> one. And if you look at them, there is no big difference to FI2DEF or to
> the previous versions of FATDEF and DIRDEF. With the header files and
> McCoy's book you should be able to follow the "on disk structures".

Something has been bothering me for a while.  Yeah, I know, who cares?

Just about every time I see something about character coding beyond Ascii, I see 
references to the C RTL.  So which is it, VMS supports this stuff, or the C RTL 
supports this stuff?

In my opinion, which nobody has to respect, only if the support was part of VMS, 
not some language, could it be claimed that VMS supported this stuff, or just 
about anything else.  If I cannot use it as a general VMS capability, then it's 
just a C application.

:-)