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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/30/2021 12:40 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 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.

I don't see why UTF-8 support should solve the problem of having
to escape the character used for string start and end.

And most platforms ten to use UTF-16 internally (memory) and
UTF-8 externally (IO).

> 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,

As PHP 6 showed.

Arne