On Mon, 11 Oct 2021 at 21:19, E. Auer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> By definition, anything above 127 is not ASCII, so it will depend
> on the codepage. Still, it is extremely rare that people use more
> than one codepage on the same system AND have identical characters
> with different byte values depending on which codepage they use AND
> have keyboard drivers which support both BUT want to switch on the
> fly instead of using a boot menu option or a simple batch script to
> go to one of the codepage/layout combinations.

Agreed!

> The real solution for the whole mess would probably be to use
> Unicode and graphical fonts with a few 10000 or more glyphs,
> but that would also be a very unlikely choice for DOS users ;-)

Yeah, no. :-)

> So while I can confirm that it is possible to design a problem to
> which your plan would be a solution, I still have big problems with
> the question "Will any user apart from yourself need anything even
> remotely as flexible as your planned inter-driver config signals?"

Also agreed.

A question:

Does the old MS-style

[
[CONFIG.SYS]

country=044,437,c:\dos\country.sys

[AUTOEXEC.BAT]

keyb uk,437,c:\dos\keyboard.sys
]

... config still work? If not, would it work if the files were copied
from MS-DOS or DR-DOS or something?

If someone requires this level of configurability, then I guess it's
necessary functionality.

Back when I did DOS tech support in a Swedish stockbroker in the early
1990s, I had one Norwegian user. For them, I had to configure the
Norwegian codepage and Norwegian keyboard layout, because PC ANSI had
the letters å and æ that Norwegian needs, but not ø. (Instead it has
the Swedish letters ä and ö.)

The Norwegian codepage redefines the ¥ symbol to be ø. (And something
else for Ø I suppose, but I forget after nearly 30 years.) So you
couldn't write about amounts in Japanese Yen in Norwegian (!).

A decade later I was engaged to a Norwegian and learned to speak the
language at a basic level. One letter may not seem like much but it
was a big deal for about 10 million people.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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