Hi,
tom ehlert escribió:
Well, neither do I because as I never change codepages once DOS is loaded, I use the formally incorrect but practical MODE CON CP SEL= instead of NLSFUNC/CHCP.Hello Eduardo,
Lucho, Steffen, everybody, we should have some discussion to determine
which COUNTRY.SYS format we should use in FreeDOS.
1'st let me state that I never used NLSFUNC, so I may be the wrong
person.
However, I appreciate that
1) NLSFUNC was marked (with no opposition so far) as pre-1.0
2) Eduardo's attempt has shown some other small lacks in kernel that are being addressed (by him and by other person), so that's good :)
2'nd, all I needed for FreeDOS was 24 hour time/european date,I agree, but perhaps Eduardo means that he is taking steps in order to use the WHOLE information (including the collating/capital/lowercase tables), but with a COUNTRY.SYS format which is not the same as MS but the same than Steffen uses with LOAD_UNC and such.
and I implemented it
in the kernel.sys (rather then in some external COUNTRY.SYS),
because it requires only a few bytes (for the current supported
date,time, currency,...) and is hardly worth the requirement of an
extra COUNTRY.SYS.
this changes IMO, if uppercasing tables etc. are supported for many
countries, but not sooner; and I think that moving the date/time
functionality to *require* COUNTRY.SYS is a step in the wrong
direction (even if it suits lucho in his attempts to get a few byte
smaller kernel)
My personal opinion is that, up to copyright issues, I guess that it is better to use the MS format, because otherwise we don't have the collating/uppercase/lowercase tables except for American English and for German, but not for other formats.
MS compatibility: this is the way MS-NLSFUNC works (see RBIL's: Int 2F/AX=1226h, http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-4406.htm).In fact, I've had a working NLSFUNC for some weeks now. The only thing
it needs for general availability is a kernel with functions 2f.1226 to
2f.1229. Actually, it works with the implementation of these functions
that I posted to this list (I modified NLSFUNC to avoid running out of
stack as Bart suggested) and it even works calling to the int21
equivalents (saving the caller stack and switching to a local one before
calling int21).
Congratulations.
I still don't understand why this should be done from inside DOS;
Yes, but as I mentioned, the problem is that, how do we get collating tables, etc for other countries than US and Germany? We could rely on user's efforts to create those tables, but this can be quite laborious (provided that, for copyright issues, the COUNTRY.SYS of the "competitors" are distributable).Another problem is that it does _not_ uses the MS COUNTRY.SYS format,
but the one that Steffen Kaiser designed when he was implementing the
NLS support for the kernel. The advantages are that it was designed with
the kernel NLS structures in mind and that there are also utilities to
convert to/from a text (source) format.
IMO that's not a disadvantage. We can't use MS country.sys anyway, and there are hardly many third party COUNTRY.SYS's floating around we must be compatible with.
I'd prefer a different country.sys format alltogether, with smaller size in mind. It doesn't has to be xxZIP'ed (due to relative large decoding code size), but you get get a significant amount of compression by some
'this toupper table is almost the same as the table before with the expection of characters 187-192 and 205-119, differences follow'
not difficult to implement, and worth the effort IMO.
Aitor
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