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From: veit@mururoa.gmd.de (Holger Veit)
Subject: Re: 16 bit implications (Re: 7bit unclean considered harmfull (was: Re: Need your opinion (TTYDEF ))8-bit clean state))
Message-ID: <1993Jun16.154152.5624@gmd.de>
Sender: veit@mururoa (Holger Veit)
Nntp-Posting-Host: mururoa
Organization: GMD, Sankt Augustin, Germany
References: <1993Jun14.081754.18248@alf.uib.no> <1vi6ak$hs7@umd5.umd.edu> <1vigdl$ne0@sax.sax.de> <C8n7wp.62D@sugar.NeoSoft.COM>
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1993 15:41:52 GMT
Lines: 37
In article <C8n7wp.62D@sugar.NeoSoft.COM>, peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
|> In article <1vigdl$ne0@sax.sax.de> joerg@sax.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) writes:
|> > Already under discussion, in a group brewing an interface definition
|> > for a future console driver. (moderator: Julian Elischer:-)
|>
|> Will this require making the characters 32 bits in the input queue, to allow
|> out of band info?
For Heaven's sake, there are more clever mechanisms we (*) want to have.
The discussion is about 16bit systems first, i.e. Unicode (although this is not
the only way to do it), not ISO-10646 or other 32 bit systems. The internal
data passing is 16 bit characters (although it should be possible to make that
a 32bit type as well. There are frontends and backends which do conversion
into different user sets. It is possible to speak Latin-1 to the console, which
is then converted into the internal format. The video display mechanism
may then map the internal data stream to the available screen resources,
e.g. on a Hercules card with a fixed font it would translate it into the
PC8 font encoding, probably replacing several characters by an UNKNOWN symbol,
which is not available with this font. The full-blown system may have a
Unicode renderer and a Unicode frontend, the latter of which requires 16bit
packages. It might be necessary to have a modification to the character
device handling mechanism to change the granularity of I/O to 2 byte for that.
But we try to make the system modular enough not to force anyone making
changes to existing software to keep it running. To use all the features
that will or could be offered, will of course need some user work.
(*) i.e. the participants of the console group.
--
Dr. Holger Veit | INTERNET: Holger.Veit@gmd.de
| | / GMD-SET German National Research | Phone: (+49) 2241 14 2448
|__| / Center for Computer Science | Fax: (+49) 2241 14 2342
| | / P.O. Box 13 16 | Three lines Signature space
| |/ Schloss Birlinghoven | available for rent. Nearly
DW-5205 St. Augustin, Germany | unused, good conditions