Full Screen General Editor

In this section, we are going to see where our hypothetical full screen general editor should support DBCS. An example of uses is non-English speaking programmers writing programs containing DBCS in comments, literals or variable names.

• PII

  As this category, the following should be DBCS-enabled and provided in national languages.

  • Messages

  • Help panels

  • Text portions of the panels, such as Top of File, Bottom of File, the status line (for example, Line n - Column n - Insert mode) and function key area
  
  Name data for communication between the system and the user (or name data for the system to identify system resources)

  You should support DBCS file/extension name, for example, in FILE and SAVE command. (As explained before, OS/2 supports mixed string in file/extension name.)

  If your editor supports a command which assigns a symbolic name to a line so that other commands can refer to this line by the name, allow the user to choose a name that can be easily memorized it usually in his national language.

  Accelerator keys, such as Alt-J to join, Alt-B to mark a block and Alt-C to copy a marked area, may be difficult to memorize for non-English speaking people. Therefore, customization capability of the key assignments is desired.

  By the same reason, mnemonic keys should also be customizable. Japanese OS/2 support alternate mnemonics.

  
  Fields and items for any kind of data

  The hypothetical editor is a general editor. So, the editing area should accept any kind data including texts and names. This area should support DBCS input and DBCS display (DBCS presentation).

  Consequently, some commands should support DBCS in their arguments.

  ---

  [Back: Programming Language Compiler]
  [Next: General Considerations]