lynx-dev EXP_KEYBOARD_LAYOUT change (was: dev.15 patch 1)

[Klaus Weide]

On Thu, 2 Dec 1999 address@hidden wrote:

> >* Changed EXP_KEYBOARD_LAYOUT logic so that input characters that are
> >  unrepresentable in the current display character set (unless it is UTF-8)
> >  get transformed into '?' instead of some accidentally chosen 8-bit
> >  character.
> 
> "some accidentally chosen 8-bit character" is a much better choice than "?".
> At least different chars are shown with different glyphs.  

So what's good about that, if that "different glyph" has nothing to do
with the intended one?

Actually, what did happen was that all characters showed up as the *same*
8-bit character (0xfc or 0xf2 or something like it), a negative error code
not treated but just cast to a (char).  Not really "accidentally chosen",
just an "accident".

> And you will not
> mixup these unrecognized chars with a "true" "?".

If you are typing something and not noticing that it's being translated
into garbage, then you lose anyway.

> Why not show them as ?234 which an appropriate highlight (here 234 is the 
> octal
> code of the input byte)?

Fell free to submit better code, to make EXP_KEYBOARD_LAYOUT more useful.
(For one thing, make it useful for more people than just Russians with US
keyboard, by contributing tables.  Or at least document that it is only
useful for Russians[*] with US keyboards[*].)  Make it beep, make it
output some transliteration, whatever.  This was just meant as a minimal
fix.

[*] Maybe that's not exactly true - maybe it should by Users of Cyrillic
(not sure whether any non-Russian Cyrillic characters are covered), maybe
on Latin-based keyboards.

   Klaus