[Info-vax] Character sets

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2022-09-02 20:15, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-09-02, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>> On 2022-09-02 15:16, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> 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."
>>
>> I can give you a program for Linux right now, that also expects
>> ISO-646-SE, in case you really insist on thinking that this has anything
>> to do with VMS.
>>
> 
> Any many Linux programmers would even know that such a thing exists,
> let alone have any need to use it ?

That have even less relevance. The point is that this have nothing to do 
with the OS. It's simply a case of an application using/assuming the 
user is using some specific character set on his terminal.

> You could also do a version of Emacs (for example) that outputs EBCDIC
> codes instead of one of the normal character sets when run on Linux.
> How useful would that be to normal Linux users ? :-)

If you had a user with a terminal that speaks EBCDIC, it could 
potentially be very useful. Is that a normal Linux user? Probably not. 
Don't make it less useful for the person in that situation, and the fact 
that it happens on Linux is actually irrelevant.

> BTW, it's to do with VMS because VMS is the host OS for the applications
> that still use these 7-bit national character sets today.

It happens because we're talking about old software that have not been 
rewritten, and that in turns leads to people needing/using terminals 
that can show this correctly. Which putty can't, and that was the 
complaint against putty. Which would be equally true if you find an old 
program for any kind of Unix, written to use such character sets. And 
yes, they do exist.

   Johnny