[Info-vax] Internationalization (was: Re: Transferring file to VMS emulated in SIMH)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-12-29 20:45:35 +0000, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply said:

> In article <34c937b1-0d6f-4b54-bc2c-9d350ad9480a at googlegroups.com>,
> Steven Schweda <sms.antinode at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> It's hard not to marvel at the distribution of parentheses in a message like:
>> %VCG-I-SUMMARY, Completed with 0 error(s), 0 warning(s), and
> 
> Arguably correct, i.e. appropriate for any number, with the reader 
> choosing the s or not.

>> 1 informational messages.
> 
> But here, the s is wrong.

I suspect that's what was being referenced.  A developer somewhere 
didn't...  Or couldn't.

Not that anybody is going to look at a compiler that can't compile 
common code.   The VCG optimizer and the MD5 reference source code 
don't play well together, for instance.

VSI is not likely to spend much time on VGG or GEM work, either.   LLVM 
and x86-64 is the path.

> DCL has a function to do this correctly.  :-)

For DEC MCS encoding with US English and with another ~dozen languages, yes.

But outside that ~dozen of languages, no.  Use of SYS$FAO and f$fao is 
headed for trouble.

https://dev.eiffel.com/Internationalization/plural_forms

OpenVMS internationalization support is largely or entirely unchanged 
from the previous millennium.

And the DEC NCS stuff was deprecated a long time ago, as far as 
DEC/Compaq/HP/HPE was concerned, though VSI may or may not follow that.

Encoding and language support avoids problems with properly sorting 
text, and upcasing and downcasing, beyond dealing with plurals.

And yes, both lowercase ß and uppercase ẞ sharp S do now exist.

And as the character encoding... The lack of UTF-8 is limiting.  As is 
the lack of flagging on the descriptors.  I have to track my own string 
encoding.

VAX, Alpha or Itanium are unlikely to see any work on UTF-8, and 
certainly not until well after the x86-64 port and a pile or three of 
other work is completed.


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