Date: Tue, 01 Apr 1997 22:25:23 +0100
From: Matthias Paul <PAUL-MA AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Subject: Re: wish list 2.0
To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
Message-id: <2BFB7A95ED3@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de>
Organization: Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen
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On Tue, 01 Apr 1997, Kent Byerley asked:
> Matthias Paul wrote:
> > On Fri, 28 Mar 1997, Colin W. Glenn wrote:
> > > OpenDOS should also support single-stepping the boot as well.
...
> >   Using the undocumented YESCHAR= directive, you can select the
> >   character you want to be asked for instead of <Y>, e.g. YESCHAR=J
> >   would fix these problems for Germany.
> 
> Does this mean that if your an in single step mode the YESCHAR=J
> directive is found
> that you will be asked (Y/N) and after that you will be asked (J/N)?
> 
Yes Kent, that's it.  YESCHAR=O in France, YESCHAR=S in Spain and 
Italy, ...

(Of course, the YESCHAR= directive not only works in single-
stepping... ;-) 

As I said, currently, the YESCHAR= directive works for CONFIG.SYS 
only, not even for the Yes/No-determination interrupt, which still 
depends on the localized kernel variant, that is English for the 
current OpenDOS release.  However, all those external commands should 
also honore this interrupt, which they currently do not.  

But we should enhance this over the whole system, introducing a new
API to retrieve enhanced country specific information, including 
the YesChar. Some ideas concerning special chars:

In CONFIG.SYS:    In Batchjobs:   and also via a new API (very easy)

YESCHAR=Y         %YesChar%
NOCHAR=N          %NoChar% 
DIRCHAR=D         %DirChar%      \ for File/Dir determination
FILECHAR=F        %FileChar%     /
ABORTCHAR=A       %AbortChar%    \
RETRYCHAR=R       %RetryChar%    | for Abort/Retry/Ignore/Fail
IGNORECHAR=I      %IgnoreChar%   |     questions
FAILCHAR=F        %FailChar%     /

Doing so, we could reduce country specific problems, e.g. in 
multi-lingual batchjobs.  Imagine the following: 

Under special circumstances MOVE asks if the destination is a <f>ile 
or <d>irectory.  In a normal batchjob, this is no problem at all, in 
an English environment just write, e.g. 

 ECHO D | MOVE source destination
  
Executing this in Germany would do the opposite, since the German word 
for <F>ile is <D>atei, which matches perfectly with <D>irectory. ;-)
There are more such scenarios... Other languages have very similar 
problems.

 ECHO %DirChar%D | MOVE source destination

would work ok, if %DirChar% was a system function, like all those 
other COMMAND.COM functions.

Bye,

Matthias

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