Classics Forum

Re: DATE FORMATS IN SPANISH, ISQL 2.10

Posted By: Jonathan Leffler
Date: Monday, 3 November 2008, at 10:46 p.m.

In Response To: DATE FORMATS IN SPANISH, ISQL 2.10 (FRANK ROTOLO)

On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 1:44 PM, FRANK ROTOLO
<frank@1-shot-exterminating.net> wrote:
> I'm using a legacy version of Informix-SQL (v. 2.10.06) under MS-DOS. It does
> not support GLS (DBLANG). I'm trying to display month and day abbreviations in
> spanish. Examples: ene for (Jan)uary, lun for (Mon)day, etc. I changed the
> month
> and day abbreviation values in perf.iem and rds.iem using DOS debug, but this
> didn't work. It seems like the perform screen gets these values directly from
> the
> DOS BIOS real time clock. I know that most of you will recommend for me to
> change to ISQL v 7.x, but my customer does not wish to upgrade to linux. Is
> there a windows version of ISQL 7.x? or is there another alternative to this
> problem?
> I also had to use DBDATE=MDY4- to solve the century problem associated with
> versions older than 7.x now my customer has to enter dates using mm-dd-yyyy
> format. Does anyone have suggestions for setting the month/day abbreviations
> to spanish?

Phew - ISQL 2.10.06 is incredibly old. I guess it does work and it is
Y2K-compliant enough, though that was anything but guaranteed with a
product released in 1986 or 1987.

Prior to DBLANG (which was, IIRC, introduced with NLS in ODS version
6.00, rather than with GLS, which was added in IDS version 7.20),
there was the LANG environment variable, I think. By setting LANG=es,
maybe ... emphasis on maybe; I don't have anything that old to test
with ... then maybe ISQL would look in $INFORMIXDIR/$LANG before
looking for $INFORMIXDIR/english and $INFORMIXDIR/msg for the message
files. I seem to remember that being the behaviour, but it could be
that was introduced in version 4, rather than being supported in
version 2.x.

Glug...I found some code labelled feixdir4.c (for the version 4
Informix directory mapping). It appears to use DBLANG and not LANG
(so maybe I have those two back to front -- LANG is certainly a part
of NLS, along with LC_ALL, LC_MONETARY, LC_TIME, LC_CTYPE,
LC_MESSAGES, LC_COLLATE, LC_NUMERIC. So, if you can find no evidence
of DBLANG in the object files, nor any evidence of LANG, you are
probably stuck. (I also found some v6 code that looks for DBLANG,
then LANG. So DBLANG is probably the older environment variable.)

I don't know how the DOS BIOS clock would return the localized day
abbreviations. Did you find messages +1200 and +1201 (and +1206,
+1207)? Most likely you did; these are in rds.iem. They contain day
and month abbreviations, and the full month names (+1206 for January
to June, +1207 for July to December).

Frankly, you are looking at a product that has been out of support for
nearly two decades (15 years, anyway). It is a minor miracle that it
is still running. Computers run about 100 times as fast, have maybe
1000 times as much RAM, and about 5000 times as much disk space as
back then. This machine is not merely old; it should be fossilized by
now.

You are most unlikely to find anyone who can do much - especially
about the date format necessary to circumvent Y2K issues. If you want
a fix, you will simply have to upgrade. And no, there isn't an ISQL
version for Windows that is current either -- I'm not sure when the
last ISQL for Windows was produced, but it was a long time ago. At
minimum a decade, I would estimate.

When did MS stop supporting the version of DOS you are running? Or
are you in fact running it on a Windows machine (which version?) in
some compatibility mode?

If futzing the message files doesn't help, I don't think there is
anything much that will help.

(If you need a message file decompiler - and compiler - contact me; I
do have independent implementations of those, but they are 32-bit
POSIX-compliant code, using an ANSI C compiler (but it only needs to
be C89, not C99). That might help you establish whether you broke
anything when editing (the copies of - I trust!) the message files.)

--
Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h>
Email: jleffler@earthlink.net, jleffler@us.ibm.com
Guardian of DBD::Informix v2008.0513 -- http://dbi.perl.org/
"Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease
to be amused."
NB: Please do not use this email for correspondence.
I don't necessarily read it every week, even.

Messages In This Thread

• DATE FORMATS IN SPANISH, ISQL 2.10
  FRANK ROTOLO -- Saturday, 1 November 2008, at 5:44 p.m.
  • Re: DATE FORMATS IN SPANISH, ISQL 2.10
    Jean Sagi -- Saturday, 1 November 2008, at 9:09 p.m.
  • Re: DATE FORMATS IN SPANISH, ISQL 2.10
    Jonathan Leffler -- Monday, 3 November 2008, at 10:46 p.m.

Classics Forum is maintained by Administrator with WebBBS 5.12.