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

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <631149a3$0$702$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
=?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?= <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes: 

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

Good summary.

> 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    Ã
      Ê    Þ    å
> ISO-646-SE       Ä    Ö    Ã
      À    ö    å
> 
> (I hope those 8 byte characters goes through)

I was going to ask "what 8-byte characters?" since I didn't see any when 
reading your post.  Now, on a VT320 using NEWSRDR, I see them when
composing this post in EDT, but probably not as you intended me to see
them. 

> 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.

In general, yes.  But considering just VMS and the applications which 
comes with it, one is essentially stuck with MCS.  Yes, I have a script 
which converts "pseudocode" text (using two-character mnemonics which 
otherwise don't occur in the language in question) to the corresponding 
8-bit characters for a particular encoding, then specify that encoding 
for the resulting HTML page.  I can thus create a document in, say, 
Serbian using Cyrillic letters on VMS and it will look as it should when 
viewed in or printed from a web browser.  But that's just me.  :-)

I am a heavy user of LaTeX, and of VMS.  At some point some fork of TeX 
allowed one to input 8-bit characters, e.g. ä instead of \"a, but there 
is no easy way to do that on VMS in general (especially if one wants to 
read the source).  (There are some advantages to using the 8-bit 
characters directly.)

> (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.

I remember getting email from Sweden using the Swedish replacement 
characters around 1993.  I wrote an EDT macro to globally search and 
replace them in both directions to make reading and writing email to 
that particular Swedish colleague easier.