I just spent two hours finding why an INTERPRET function in LSVIMAIL crashed
from time to time on one of our local lists. I traced and traced and traced and
everything seemed to be ok, but it still crashed. Here is how I found: (log is
as it appeared on my console)
(...)
say '/'varname'/'
/LSVU@N(whom)/
v = 'LSVU@N(whom)'
say '/'v'/'
/LSVU@N(whom)/
say v = varname
0
say length(v)
12
say length(varname)
12
Now, after having rubbed your eyes ten times, you have right to take an
aspirin before reading the rest :-)
On our consoles we can display the full french set of accentuated characters,
but some of them cannot be ENTERED on the keyboard. A student wrote an ACCENT
XEDIT macro a long time ago which converts "^e" to an accentuated e, etc. I
used that macro to prepare the FRENCH MAILFORM file, of course.
Now this character: @ (accentuated a) is not the same as this one: Ö (accen-
tuated a). I looked at every pixel of the thing as closely as I could, but
found no difference. The hex code is not the same, though. The *clever* ACCENT
macro converts the @ into a Ö. The latter is an invalid REXX character, though.
Morals:
1) <censored paragraph about the *sensibility* and *intelligence* of IBM>
2) BEWARE OF NATIONAL CHARACTER SET!! When you prepare a mailform containing
national characters, please be sure that there is no incompatibility with
the MAILER, for example. Fyi, I had to change the names of two users who
had signed on with accentuated e and i in their names, because the MAILER
rejected anything sent to them (*cough* those characters do NOT appear in
the "specials = " definition in RFC822 STANDARD. Yet... it was the very same
message...)
About "Language=" keyword: LSVFDATE can now produce the date in three langua-
ges, and the V1.4d mailform can translate the 'remark' field into the same
languages: french, spanish and catalan. I found myself unable to translate ANY-
THING at all into spanish/italian/russian ( ;-) ) because I just have no idea
of what the technical terms can be in those idioms, so I can't help any further
(Jose provided the spanish and catalan translations). If you want your
country's language to be supported by LISTSERV, and have 15 minutes to devote
to some boring translation, just let me know and I'll send you the appropriate
files so that you may update them and make them available to the Ever Grateful
(??) World :-)
Finally, about "Service=", I decided to provide a special countryname of
"Europe". Since I have no idea of what the very official Europe is, I arbitrari
ly decided that anything that is on EARN is in Europe, period. Countries which
are not yet connected may or may not have been assigned the correct contient.
Perhaps I should C/Europe/EARN/ to avoid any confusion?
Eric
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