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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2022-09-01 18:04:31 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> 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 ?

If you're maintaining retired-in-place apps into app oblivion or are 
maintaining apps until staff retirement, platform changes—such as added 
character encoding, or widening the available keyboard support—just 
aren't necessary, and often aren't desirable.

If you're working on new app deployments or on wholly new apps, sure, 
the existing implementation details and limits are somewhere between 
difficult and annoying, and more effort.

If you're unwary enough to stray outside of DEC MCS / mostly ISO 8859-1 
/ Latin-1 with your app.

Character encoding is endemic; in DCL, APIs, filenames including UTF-8 
and sorting-related discussions, RFAs, FIDs, file sizes.

The fun awaiting here with increased storage sizes and storage 
capacities and storage addressing and storage features and encodings is 
~endless.

ODS-5 / EFS support has not yet landed in many apps, 64-bit storage 
addressing, and I've had difficulty even finding whatever doc was made 
available for the UTF-8 support that snuck out.

Descriptors—arguably an ancestral form of an object—presently lack any 
support for language and character encoding storage.

This is also a completely self-solving problem, of course. Albeit slowly.



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