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

[P. Sture]

In article <PzqDm.12336$U5.175571 at newsb.telia.net>,
 Jan-Erik Söderholm <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote:

> Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote:
> 
> > I agree more or less if we are talking about "special characters".
> > I don't understand why people encode 7-bit US ASCII.
> 
> I don't think "people" are encoding anything.
> 
> I'd guess that if there is some single character that is
> outside this old "7-bit US-ASCII" character table (such
> as if I write my own name as it should be written, which
> is part om the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) table), the whole post
> becomes "quoted printable" and in that case even some other
> "7-bit US ASCII" are hit by this "encoding" just becuse
> that is how quited-printable works.

If you include accented character in a message, VMS MAIL itself will 
send like this:

MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=iso-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE

> Anyway, trying to use tools that doesn't work in todays
> IT environment just falls back on oneself. Such as trying
> to always use VMS based tools. That might be of some fun
> but do not expect everyone else to adapt their routines
> just becuse of some die-hards that can't learn.
> 
> It would be enough to see the "US" part of "US ASCII" to
> understand that we today lives in a world that is slightly
> larger then the "US"...
> 
> Common, we are soon to enter 2010 and to still have this
> "7-bit ASCII" discussion is just silly...

A while ago I switched to using UTF-8 by default (on OS X) but I 
recently got caught out with stuff that was coming back to me as
Unicode.

-- 
Paul Sture