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

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-09-01, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>
> 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
>

[snip]

>
> So I am not surprised that there still exist VMS
> applications using national variants of ASCII.
>
> That is how the real world is.
>

Thank you for the detailed writeup Arne. As I have just told
Jan-Erik, it's a very different mindset to the one I am used to. :-)

Simon.

PS: I do now understand why this was done, but at the same time, for any
VMS systems still doing this, it could easily give the impression to people
not familiar with VMS of how once again "that VMS system is different from
all the other systems we use."

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.