[Info-vax] Micro Focus to be acquired by Open Text

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2022-09-01 20:04, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-08-31, Jan-Erik Söderholm <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote:
>> Den 2022-08-31 kl. 23:32, skrev Arne Vajhøj:
>>>
>>> I always liked Reflection.
>>>
>>> But the reality today is that putty is good enough for most.
>>>
>>
>> Sure. But Reflection was still "better"... :-)
>>
>> Putty lacks the 7-bit national character sets.
>> Both Reflection and Extra can handle those.
>>
> 
> But haven't we moved on from this in the same way as we have moved on
> from requiring DEC keyboards instead of PC keyboards to access VMS
> systems ?
> 
> Shouldn't VMS systems be generating code sets that are compatible
> with how code systems work today, not how they worked 30+ years ago ?
> 
> How do the Nordic special characters get represented in the 7-bit
> character sets anyway or do they use 8-bits for some of the characters ?
> 
> I can't think of any Swedish places with any special characters, but
> how would the following places have been represented in the old days ?
> 
> 	Flåm
> 	Bodø
> 
> In ISO-8859-1, the special characters in the above are encoded as 8-bit
> characters (and are broken as expected when displayed using UTF-8 :-)).
> 
> What positions would the special characters above have occupied in the
> old days ?
> 
> For the benefit of anyone whose terminal emulator messes up the above,
> this is a dump/record of the file I created with those above examples:
> 
> Record number 1 (00000001), 5 (0005) bytes, RFA(0001,0000,0000)
> 
>                           6D E56C4609 .Flåm........... 000000
> 
> Record number 2 (00000002), 5 (0005) bytes, RFA(0001,0000,0008)
> 
>                           F8 646F4209 .Bodø........... 000000

What do VMS have to do with this? This might as well be very application 
specific. And what people are talking about are the 7-bit national 
character sets, which obviously cannot be ISO-8859-x since they are all 
8-bit character sets.

In fact, what we're talking about (if we talk specifically about 
Swedish) is ISO-646-SE, where the characters []\{}| are used for ÄÅÖäåö.

And if you happen to run an application that is using ISO-646-whatever, 
then you'd better have a terminal that can display it properly as well.
All DEC VT terminals can.

   Johnny