[Info-vax] 8-bit characters

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/10/2021 7:21 PM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> Den 2021-11-10 kl. 19:04, skrev Stephen Hoffman:
>> This is part of the (lack of) UTF-8 and Unicode support in OpenVMS and 
>> its tooling that I've grumbled. Not that adding UTF-8 and Unicode 
>> support is ever going to be a small overhaul.
> 
> Now, UTF8 is just a "row of bytes", so if you use (as an example) Putty
> in its default setup using UTF8, you can type (or copy/paste) any UTF8
> character into Putty and it will be stored using whatever editor you
> are using. It is just a row of bytes, so there is no specific need for
> any "UTF8 support" for doing just that.
> 
> Later on, of you send the same text to some UTF8 compatible display (like
> another Putty session using the default UTF8 setup, or a web browser using
> UTF8 encoding) the Islandic characters would be displayed just fine.
> 
> But if you are using some display tool that doesn't support UTF8, you
> will get garbled text, of course. But that is not the fault of OpenVMS.

The biggest problems with UTF-8 is that the byte length is not 
necessarily the character length and that byte index i is not character 
index i (and worse byte index i may not even point to a character at all
if it hits in the middle of a multi-byte sequence).

> It is unclear if ISO/IEC 646 have/had support for Icelandic characters,
> the Wiki page has an entry for "IS" in some tables but no real data.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646

http://www.kreativekorp.com/charset/encoding/ISO646IS/

https://www.freeutils.net/source/jcharset/ & 
https://www.mvndoc.com/c/net.freeutils/jcharset/net/freeutils/charset/iso646/ISO646ISCharset.html

seems to indicate that it exist.

Arne