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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/1/2022 2:04 PM, 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 ?

First the background info about what this is all about
------------------------------------------------------

ANSI ASCII ~ ISO-646 ~ ECMA-6 is a character set going back to
the mid 60's. It only define 0-127 so it can work with 7 bit
comm.

128 character was not enough to cover all western languages,
so there were actually multiple mappings defined:

ISO-646 for English
ISO-646-DK for Danish
ISO-646-SE for Swedish
etc.

The differences was related to only a few characters.

Most relevant for Danes and Swedes are:

                0x5B 0x5C 0x5D   0x7B 0x7C 0x7D
ISO-646          [    \    ]      {    |    }
ISO-646-DK       Æ    Ø    Å      æ    ø    å
ISO-646-SE       Ä    Ö    Å      ä    ö    å

(I hope those 8 byte characters goes through)

In DEC VT terminals these "national variants" became
known as NRCS (National Replacement Character Sets).

Then is this stuff obsolete?
----------------------------

With the arrival of 8 bit character sets in the form
of DECMCS ~ ISO-8859 ~ ECMA-94 (~ CP-125x) in the mid 80's then
those national variants became obsolete.

(which was a blessing for all programmers as the values
changed in the national variants are widely used in
programming languages !)

My personal experience is that the national variants
dropped out of mainstream IT during the 90's.

So an application using those national variants should
probably have been rewritten sometime in the mid 90's
to use ISO-8859 (and rewritten again late 00's
to use UTF-8).

But as we all know then applications does not always
get rewritten.

And this would not just be a code change but also
a data conversion.

So I am not surprised that there still exist VMS
applications using national variants of ASCII.

That is how the real world is.

Arne