I saw Wilhelm's earlier comment and started thinking about some of its implications: i) NLS support: Is there anybody who can tell me if all DOS commands support [J(a)|Nein] or [O(ui)|N(on)] etc. instead of [Y(es)|N(o)]? If not, they should do it. As a translator you never know what to do. Supporting multiple languages brings up all kinds of technical issues. E.g., there are at least three different ways to approach this: compile all the languages into one executable file (makes for a very large file and also requires recompilation if a new language is added), compile different executables for each language (creates lots of different executable files where each needs a separate name), or have a "base" executable with separate "adjunct" files for each language (probably the most efficient option in terms of total size). A major issue is that interactive items (like Yes/No or Abort/Retry/Fail) require two-way interaction. That is, in addition to displaying different things on the screen for the different languages, you also have different input keys that can respond to the different options (e.g., Y/N for English and J/N for German). That gets really ugly to program and from a design perspective it becomes an issue as to where the store the input key data. That is, particularly if you have a common "base" program with separate language files, where does the data for the correct input keys (which vary by language) get stored -- in the base program or in the language file? Does the base program really even need to know what language is being supported or can the base program be totally independent of language and ALL the language data (both input and output information) is contained in the language files? This gets further complicated if you support languages that aren't based on a Latin alphabet (Cyrillic, Arabic, CJK, Greek, and Hebrew come to mind immediately) where the Code Page comes into play as well (and the ASCII codes for the input key data can vary depending on the current Code Page). I'm really wondering if anybody has really thought this all the way through and has some sort of flexible structure figured out. I've considered adding language support to some of my programs (if I could get someone to do the translations), but just designing a support structure to handle all the possibilities is pretty daunting. I realize this doesn't have a direct relationship to FreeDOS 1.3, but it got me to thinking about the complications of language support in general.
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