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

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2022-09-03 kl. 19:24, skrev Arne Vajhøj:
> On 9/3/2022 7:12 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> On 2022-09-02 16:58, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 9/2/2022 10:48 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>>> On 2022-09-02 14:24, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>> Well, BASIC is really fond of $, which usually also gets replaced with 
>>>> another character in these NRCS. ;-)
>>>>
>>>> I'll leave it at that.
>>>
>>> True.
>>>
>>> Typical:
>>>
>>> ¤
>>
>> Yeah. I think the official name is "currency symbol" or something like 
>> that. People just said "sol" (Swedish for "sun").
> 
> Thinking about it - the PHP programmers would also miss $.
> 
> :-)
> 
>>>> But I sortof half-fondly remember using RSTS/E in Sweden in the early 
>>>> 80s. Accounts were PPNs, enclosed in brackets. Also used for the 
>>>> directory. I had Ä120,114Å. :-)
>>>
>>> Did it allow <> instead of []?
>>
>> Nope. VMS and RSX have that, but RSTS/E didn't/don't.
> 
> I wonder whether the <> support was due to ISO-646-national.
> 
> Arne
> 

It might not have been the root cause, but on an Swedish keyboard
layout, typing <> is easier and faster then typing []...

I try to say to our programmers that it is fine to use <> for
their command line work, but to always use [] in command files
and when defining logical names.

I have seen some freeware utilities that fails on logicals
that uses <> in directory definitions.