-delimiting character, VOS files, directories, or links whose names
-contain a slash character cannot be processed. Such files must be
-renamed before they can be processed by Perl. Note that VOS limits
-file names to 32 or fewer characters, file names cannot start with a
-C<-> character, or contain any character matching C<< tr/ !%&'()*+;<>?// >>
-
-The value of C<$^O> on VOS is "VOS". To determine the architecture that
-you are running on without resorting to loading all of C<%Config> you
-can examine the content of the @INC array like so:
+delimiting character, VOS files, directories, or links whose
+names contain a slash character cannot be processed. Such files
+must be renamed before they can be processed by Perl.
+
+Older releases of VOS (prior to OpenVOS Release 17.0) limit file
+names to 32 or fewer characters, prohibit file names from
+starting with a C<-> character, and prohibit file names from
+containing any character matching C<< tr/ !#%&'()*;<=>?// >>.
+
+Newer releases of VOS (OpenVOS Release 17.0 or later) support a
+feature known as extended names. On these releases, file names
+can contain up to 255 characters, are prohibited from starting
+with a C<-> character, and the set of prohibited characters is
+reduced to any character matching C<< tr/#%*<>?// >>. There are
+restrictions involving spaces and apostrophes: these characters
+must not begin or end a name, nor can they immediately precede or
+follow a period. Additionally, a space must not immediately
+precede another space or hyphen. Specifically, the following
+character combinations are prohibited: space-space,
+space-hyphen, period-space, space-period, period-apostrophe,
+apostrophe-period, leading or trailing space, and leading or
+trailing apostrophe. Although an extended file name is limited
+to 255 characters, a path name is still limited to 256
+characters.
+
+The value of C<$^O> on VOS is "VOS". To determine the
+architecture that you are running on without resorting to loading
+all of C<%Config> you can examine the content of the @INC array
+like so: