[Oberon] Re (2): Communicating with aliens

[R. P. de Jong]

Hi Joerg, Peter, Paul Reed, Others


Agree the differences in arrow-key to ASCII mapping is unfortunate. 
I guess since in Project Oberon the arrow keys have not been used until recently (afaik), nobody paid much attention to their ascii codes. Personally, i don’t even know which ascii codes the FPGA and Windows emulator system use for the arrow keys and if these codes were consciously chosen (considering that they are different on FPGA and the Windows emulator, as you mention).

In my opinion it is practically unavoidable to have different Input.Mod implementations for various systems, unless you allow only the FPGA and its standard keyboard. In Oberon Workstation, the Input.Mod has a implementation that is almost empy because we don’t need to assemble ascii from key-scan codes, modifier keys and key-up/down information. You might as well edit this module to translate the current DC1..DC4 codes to anything that you consider practical for the moment.

If Prof. Wirth himself and/or Paul Reed would provide a resolution consisting of 4 ascii control codes to represent the arrow keys (also in the FPGA system and Windows emulator), i’ll be happy to adopt these in the next release of Oberon Workstation. Although we have a considerable amount of users nowadays (since someone mentioned the app on HN/YC), it is still not too painful to change the arrow codes i guess.

Regards,
Roel P. de Jong



> On 13 Jan, 2016, at 14:46 , peter at easthope.ca wrote:
> 
> From:	Joerg <joerg.straube at iaeth.ch>
> Date:	Tue, 12 Jan 2016 11:31:53 +0100
>> 2) ... a little unfortunate that Project Oberon has no 
>> standardized definitions of the key codes for the up, left, right and 
>> down keys. ...
> 
> Important detail.  Thanks Joerg.
> 
>> 1) In the original Input.Mod there is an array for key code mapping.
> 
> No offense to authors but a more difficult small accessory trail from 
> the main route Input.
> 
>> 2) add constant definitions in Input.Mod (either fix or varying per 
>> platform) for the control keys ...
> 
> Thanks again,                          ... Peter E.
> 
> -- 
> 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 12
> Tel +1 360 639 0202 
> http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca
> 
> --
> Oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems
> https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon