[Info-vax] 8-bit characters

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <smhnmj$2d8$1 at dont-email.me>,
=?UTF-8?Q?Jan-Erik_S=c3=b6derholm?= <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com>
writes: 

> 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.
> 
> 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
> 
> Then of course, it is a totally other matter if you are talkning about
> UTF8 support for symbols/variables in compilers or in file/directory
> names, but that is a totally differnt area from just storing and
> displaying some "data" that happens to include UTF8 sequences.
> But that isn't in the scope of the question asked.

Right; just a text file.

> I would not expect tools like DECterm or VT220 (really?) 

Sorry, VT320.  :-)

> to handle
> UTF8 or anything else outside the DEC-MCS range of characters. If you
> need that, simply use modern tool from the last 20 years or so.

I don't expect anything more than MCS.  I'm just wondering why in a 
DECterm it is sometimes displayed correctly and sometimes not.