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

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2022-09-01 kl. 21:06, skrev 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 ?

Just read up a little.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Replacement_Character_Set

>>
>> 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 :-)).

Yes, in ISO-8859-1, these are in the upper half of the 8-bit set.
And in UTF8 they are dual byte characters, of course.

But that doesn't help those having a lot of applications
having hard-coded text output in 7-bit national char sets.

>>
>> What positions would the special characters above have occupied in the
>> old days ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Replacement_Character_Set

>>
>> 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
> 

That is not created using 7-bit char sets. If you look up the codes
E5 and F8 you will find them in the ISO-8859-1 8-bit char set, not
in the 7-bit char-set.

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1

> 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

Jonny is of course completely right here.
Simon is lacking knowledge the Nordic ASCII 7-bit chat sets.

Extra (and Reflection) terminal emulators handles this just fine.
Putty does not, there is no 7-bit character sets at all there.

There was a time when having parity on any serial communication
was "standard", and that limitied you to 7-bit character sets.
The 8'th bit was the parity bit.