[Info-vax] Open Source on OpenVMS - A Progress Report

[Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply]

In article <YoZCm.12320$U5.173369 at newsb.telia.net>,
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jan-Erik_S=F6derholm?= <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com>
writes: 

> Sorry for top-posting... :-)
> 
> And sorry Bill for hijacking your "freeware" thread, but...
> 
> Now, this is just silly.
> 
> I see the "=A0" that Phillip complains about only in the
> quoted text that *Phillip* sent in *his* reply. Not in the
> reply sent by *Bill*. That displays just fine over here.

When I saw Bill's post, it was with "=A0" etc.  So, when I quoted it, 
that's what you saw as well.  Bill's reply might look fine to you if 
your newsreader decoded the quoted-printable stuff, whereas my post 
wasn't in quoted-printable form.  (I have an EDT macro which decodes the 
quoted-printable, but I didn't use it in my reply since I wanted to 
illustrate the problem.)

> This tells more about the tools that *Phillip* uses
> then anything else, I'd say. Bill and I are obviously
> using tools (news-readers) that handles this just fine.

I am using NEWSRDR.  No, it does not do MIME.  On the other hand, there 
is no reason to post MIME, quoted-printable etc to this group.

Is anyone aware of any other newsreader which runs on VAX and ALPHA and 
Itanium and has a character-cell interface?

> The only case when quoted printable is a problem for me, is
> when someone "out there" is still trying to use some old
> tools that doesn't handle this in a normal/standard way,
> and thus forwarding the quoted characters as-is. Why not
> simply stop using tools that have passed their "best-before"
> dates decades ago ? That seems as a much simpler
> "solution" to this silly "problem"...

Add to my question above "and handles MIME and quoted-printable stuff".
However, I still don't see why I should have to use a tool to get around
a problem which shouldn't exist (encoding PLAIN TEXT in
quoted-printable). 

> Complaining about printed quotable is just silly in a
> modern international world. There is absolutely nothing
> saying that this newsgroup or any other group should be
> only supporting characters that happens to be in the
> *english* alphabet or that it must be 7-bit plain ASCII.

I agree more or less if we are talking about "special characters".  I 
don't understand why people encode 7-bit US ASCII.