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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/2/2022 4:54 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> Den 2022-09-02 kl. 02:09, skrev Arne Vajhøj:
>> 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...

Cobol, Fortran and VMS Basic seems to work fine with
just ().

But a lot of languages (C, C++, Pascal, Ada, Java, Python,
PHP etc.) also use [] and/or {} in their syntax.

>> 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...

The wellknown:

$ write sys$output f$fao("This system will be gone by !SL", 
f$cvtime(,,"YEAR") + 3)

syndrome.

:-)

Arne