[squeak-dev] About Squeak 4.1 Language Support

K. K. Subramaniam kksubbu.ml at gmail.com
Wed Feb 2 04:34:37 UTC 2011


On Tuesday 01 Feb 2011 3:40:10 pm Eric wrote:
> Thanks Subbu,
> 
> >This is because of input method conflict between supporting legacy codes
> > and modern UTF-8 input codes across multiple platforms.
>  Don't very understand about the conflict you mentioned, could you give
> some example?
See the threads
 http://lists.squeakland.org/pipermail/etoys-dev/2010-October/005933.html
 http://forum.world.st/New-Win32-VM-m17n-testers-needed-td63730.html

In a multilingual setting, the language of input codes can be different from 
what is implied by the locale setting (system language). So one can encounter 
Chinese input in a Latin-1 locale. The image has methods to switch locales 
manually but not converters :-(. The logic for arriving at language+encoding 
is different on different platforms. Part of this logic lies in VM and part of 
it in the VM. VMs ports on Windows, Mac and Linux use different logic to deal 
with multi-byte input methods, so the code in the image has to dance around 
with VM host, locale setting and language codes to collect input.

If you are not likely to read files encoded in pre-Unicode Chinese codes and 
you are just interested in getting Squeak to deal with Chinese input on Wintel 
VM, just apply a patch to override all this logic for now. Hopefully, better 
code will emerge as we get more feedback from Chinese users.


> >See SQ-554 and its discussion in etoys-dev for the background. You can
> > adapt the patch to make it work for your case (Squeak 4 on Windows?).
> Also for SQ-554, which defect report URL for this item?  Do you mean the
> patch in etoys-dev?
Yes. In my patch, I tried to get UTF-8 encoding thru the VM into Squeak where 
I could decode uniformly. It worked on Linux VM but not on Win32. I don't have 
Win32 development machines around, so I couldn't take it further.

Subbu



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