[Info-vax] Coding style in the VMS's

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-09-30 12:13:20 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> On 2021-09-30, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <lawrencedo99 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 1:11:35 PM UTC+13, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> 
>>> I doubt anyone still wants Hollerith constants.
>> 
>> I remember in my younger days thinking how neat they were. You could 
>> have any (printable, at least) characters you liked in the string, no 
>> escaping conventions necessary.
> 
> So it turns out you are a fixed-length field type of person after all. :-)

Having UTF-8 string support and raw string support in a platform and in 
a programming language makes most of this encoding a non-issue. In 
Swift, for instance. ObjC does pretty well here, too.

This change is pervasive within a platform, both for the effort 
involved to get everything (shell, compilers, editors, libraries) 
working, and then for what can be done within the applications with 
rather less of the syntactic obfuscation.

This does get ugly when you have to retrofit support into platforms and 
apps, particularly with a platform that supports ASCII or DEC MCS / ISO 
Latin 1 and that lacks robust Unicode and UTF-8 support.

There's a reason many old server apps tend to look dated...

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