newRPL: [UPDATED April 27-2017] Firmware for testing available for download

[matthiaspaul]

(07-26-2016 09:27 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  

(07-26-2016 04:37 PM)matthiaspaul Wrote:  Your Unicode <> OEM conversion is currently hardwired to codepage 850.

Yes, mainly because it's not meant to exchange information with DOS 6.20 anymore. [...]
This won't affect you in any way, it's only to translate short names with strange characters into readable names for the calculator (these files would've been created by older OS). [...] but code pages are in the past, newRPL is Unicode compliant and not apologizing for it.

(07-27-2016 04:39 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  * Only if you create an 8.3 name with characters >127 in some other OS, those characters will be in the OEM codepage of that OS. newRPL is for simplicity going to interpret those characters as CP850 and convert them to Unicode. This is a very rare occurrence
[...]
So you'd have to use an older OS that is not LFN aware AND using a CP other than 850 to run into problems.

I'm afraid I have to disagree here. Unicode is great (although far from being perfect), but while it will be used on many new systems, I don't see codepages vanishing in the next few decades, either. Not only because many older systems exist and are still fully functional, but also because there are applications where Unicode does not offer benefits over 8-bit codepages, but just complicates a design.

What you declare as "rare occurance" would actually be the most common use case for me, transferring files from plain FAT volumes to the calculator.

Regarding OEM character translation, I think, if only one codepage could be supported, codepage 437 would be the best choice, as this is the default hardware codepage used on most PCs. Adding support for a basic repertoire of other codepages does not seem like a waste of flash space to me. A more compact table representation could be found.
Another idea is to store the translation table(s) in a special binary system file in the root directory of the volume and have the filesystem use this table if present, and default to an internally stored table for 437 if not. This could be useful also for other implementations, so we could define a little FAT extension here.

Greetings,

Matthias