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

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-09-02, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
> On 9/2/2022 9:05 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2022-09-01, Jan-Erik Söderholm <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote:
>>> Just read up a little.
>>>
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Replacement_Character_Set
>
>> Professionally, I've grown up with 8-bit character sets and then, later,
>> UTF-8, so seeing this earlier standard looks really weird and alien to me.
>
>> The idea that the same 7-bit character position can mean different
>> things in adjacent countries (such as Norway and Sweden) is indeed a
>> very alien idea to me and that would mean a company operating in both
>> countries would have some serious data interchange issues.
>
> ISO-8859 has the same basic issue. Multiple meanings of same
> code - not per country like for ISO-646 but per region.
>

That's a good point. OTOH, during all the time I have needed 8-bit
characters, I have never had to switch away from ISO-8859-1 so far
and from what I can tell, the several ISO-8859 variants I have just
looked at (1/2/4/9/10) appear to have common characters before 0x80.

BTW, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1#History contains an
amusing story about how the French delegate managed to screw up the
development of part of ISO-8859-1. :-)

Simon.

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