Mail Archives: opendos/1997/04/04/12:36:40
On Wed, 02 Apr 1997, Mike A. Harris wrote:
>This is really getting ridiculous! Is this just a joke? If
>serious, then I want a french version of "shutdown" so that I can
>type "shutdown -r maintenant" instead of "shutdown -r now"
Well, Mike, I think we *are* doing this seriously. If you want a
localized version of DOS, with many command options translated
to French or Italian, I would recommend you one of the older MS-DOS
OEM releases from France or Italy. I have copies of Compaq DOS 5.0
in my archives, were they actually did exactly what you described...
;-)
And in the German version of Novell DOS, you can also find /HILFE
instead of /HELP (luckily, these programs sense for /H only)...
I am of your option when it comes to the translation of command
line switches, since IMHO, translation in this area causes major
compatibility problems. Also, I would not like to see horrible
translated technical acronyms in German language, if I am used to
the English computer jargon. (Once upon a time, reading IBM PC
Technical Documentation in German, I saw their German translations
of rather short English terms, going over two lines a single
word!!! Actually I would have liked to ROTFL if I would not
have to had understand what they were talking about in my
mother tongue...)
But I disagree in what you said in the further:
>And I'd like a 100k driver to be present in the kernel to support
>switching between 80 different languages too.
Such a library must not be resident part of the kernel, but a file
on the harddisk. All we'd need was a small and optional API (done in
less than 1KB) to access this library. (BTW, MS-DOS COMMAND.COM /MSG
actually loads a resident message server, that cannot be found in
DR DOS, Novell DOS, nor OpenDOS.)
>Then we could implement 10000000000000000 new environment variables
>to make batch files "compatible" with the old "silly" method.
Environment variables were initially meant to describe the current
environment, that was exactly what we were doing. But when speaking
of variables like %YesChar%, I meant system functions as
%Day_Of_Week%, that would not cost a sole byte of resident code,
since they were part of the transient code of COMMAND.COM.
Easy to implement, no compatibility problems, no wastage of resources.
4DOS is nice example of the usability of all these variables and
functions, but even 4DOS was originally designed for the US market,
and still lacks in many international issues. Even their way to
introduce international features with v5.5+ was designed for the
US market, and causes many new problems. (If you like to have a
look at same examples of such bad design in 4DOS, have a look at
4DOS5TIPS.TXT/BATTIPS.TXT from MPDOSTIP.ZIP.)
When I described the idea of international characters (there are much
more issues in this area, not only such characters), I don't spoke of
structures holding the complete strings like "YesChar=J", but a small
structure that contains all these characters and other magic bits
(e.g. start and end date of summer time, that is daylight saving,
more detailed time, date, currency, list formats, etc.). Fully
featured, this could be done in less than 200 Bytes resident code.
>Don't forget the ARABIC version, that way they don't need to turn
>the monitor upside down.
Well, we have it in our hands, if OpenDOS is the beginning of a new
area for DOS (or whatsoever will be created out of it), or just
for the last collection of die-hard DOS-users (and only a 'DOS
compatibility box' under Linux)...
I think, most of us are in here, since we want to put OpenDOS on
its way in the same direction, as Linux started several years ago.
Beside hardware dependend development and specialized niche markets,
if we want real applications to be written for DOS/OpenDOS and old
applications to be updated, the operating system must support all
countries worldwide, in a way superior than all those M$-OS floating
around already do. That's the only way, a commercial developer could
be attracted by OpenDOS, since it would open new markets. In the
United States, in Western Europe, in large areas of Australia, and in
Japan, if people really want, most of them could effort enough money
to buy state-of-the-art-hardware to run all those graphically animated
OS'es at acceptable speed. Actually, most of us won't need to suffer
from too less speed, but only from lack of features we want in our
OS, and have for example in DOS, but not in Windows. We want OpenDOS,
because we like to hack at the command line, we want an easy but
flexible operating system we have full control over. I'm sure,
OpenDOS will soon become more stable, and we all know, that any
concurrency(???) in the market causes operating systems and
applications to become more stable, faster, smaller, handier,
cheaper... That's what we want.
But in Eastern Europe, in Far East, in South America, and in Africa
the situation is much different. Computers are still a priviledge
of the elite. Most of them were happy to own a computer at all, not
to speak of what we call 'state-of-the-art-hardware'. For example,
in Russia, home computers like the legacy Sinclair ZX81 are very wide
spread. Fortunately since some years, this is changing rapidly, IMHO
caused by the immense grow of the Internet. But concerning spread of
PC computers, many countries are still 10 years in back, so DOS is
very attractive there.
Another problem of localization are input and output systems.
Most people from the US and other English speaking countries
do not/cannot realize, which problems people from foreign countries
might have with the keyboard input and screen/printer output.
Using a US keyboard layout and a screen font of 437, many were
not able to use a PC and write texts in their mother language.
The US keyboards offer only a small subset of the characters
used in other languages. Some could not even reach all the
characters needed if they would try to type them in all in via the
<Alt>+NumPad method. Therefore, other codepages are needed in many
countries (and we have to expand this capability).
That's, why I didn't liked the example with the monitor turned upside
down... Just imagine trying to write a text with your own keyboard,
but half the keys were missing and the other half was rearranged.
But of course, you could type it in octet notation, were this keyboard
was optimized for. Further, the software was telling you to press
<X>, but actually, you'd have to press <Y>. Also, you could not
directly read a text on the monitor but could see only it's image in
a mirror... Would you still be a computer fan?
So IMHO, if we think of internationalization (I18n) as of fixing a
bug that has become a feature (e.g. MOVE <F>/<D> with English kernel,
and MOVE <D>/<V> in the German release), or if we actually need
a localized version of DOS, since we cannot effort other hard-/
software or don't speak English, we have to do it...
Just my two Pfennig... ;-)
Matthias
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