[Info-vax] VAX Macro to C conversion

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/26/2019 6:18 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2019-07-26 20:31:39 +0000, Simon Clubley said:
>> ...Because of what I initially read into the discussion...
> 
> Well, if we're discussing what we'd rather be working on and with—rather 
> what what we have now and will have for the foreseeable future within C 
> and C++ on OpenVMS and more generally, and which is ASCIZ—then I'd much 
> prefer dealing with Objective-C and NSString objects.
> 
> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsstring?language=objc
> 
> As compared with what NSString provides, the capabilities of ASCIZ, 
> ASCID, and ASCIC all seem rather archaic.

OO encapsulation provide some benefits.

But in the end the text needs to be stored someway.

(obviously storing 32 or 16 bit entities instead of 8 bit entities
help with Unicode)

> I've long had issues with the ASCIC, ASCID, Unicode, and UTF-8 support 
> available within C on OpenVMS.
> 
> But with C and C++ on OpenVMS and with C and C++ in general, we're going 
> to be working with ASCIZ strings for the foreseeable future.
> 
> Which means strl or _s calls, where available and permissible.  Or 
> std::string or ilk, where that's applicable.
> 
> And hacking together our own code for dealing with ASCIC, ASCID, 
> Unicode, and UTF-8, where that's necessary.

I would say that std:wstring, std::wofstream and std:wifstream with
a UTF-8 locale look as the most promising.

(from reading - no actual experience)

Arne