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

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2022-09-02 kl. 02:09, skrev 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
> ------------------------------------------------------

As Philip also noted, this is a very good summary that even
Simon should be able to understand... :-)

> 
> 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 !)

I do not think I ever have had any issues with that in Cobol...

> 
> 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).

I did write a document with a suggestion to change our
applications from 7-bit NRCS to 8-bit MCS (ISO-8859-1).
That was in 2008 and it was never done since the system
was planned for decomission in "3-4 years" anyway...

It's fine for the end-users (uses Attchmate Extra that
supports 7-bit NRCS) but we in the support uses Putty
and see the characters as Arne showed above. No big deal.

This is for the old VT-screen applications. For the new
web based apps, we use ISO-8859-1. We try to avoid UTF8.

> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
>