[Info-vax] Reading SYSUAF with DCL problem

[fredthebare at gmail.com]

On Thursday, May 10, 2018 at 12:17:22 PM UTC+10, Hein RMS van den Heuvel wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 9, 2018 at 6:23:29 PM UTC-4, dgordo... at gmail.com wrote:
[SNIP]
> Indeed, someone trying binary interpretation of SYSUAF should really understand counted strings, and to one acceptable response is 'Duh - I knew that', not fighting back with a lame 'I wonder why some UAF$T_OWNER starting at 84 are the correct ASCII character for the "real" owner name? '
> That't the definition of ignorance (of computer principles in general and OpenVMS in specific) right there. Sorry to be blunt.

It is perfectly fine to be blunt...but perhaps the tone of my "wondering" was unclear.  I vaguely recalled, and this current set of help from comp.os.vms, has reinforced the counted byte at the beginning of the string.  That value is not present in all UAF entries, some have the first byte as the ASCII value of the correct letter for the first letter of the owner.  Perhaps, as an earlier writer suggested, someone has been programmatically fiddling with the UAF entries...I don't know, but that response was more helpful than your comment and allows me to add additional logic to correct for the possibility.

But I am always happy to receive any comments :)