How a bullet turns into a beep

re: How a bullet turns into a beep

Igor — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 02:25:14 GMT

Happy New Year to Raymond. Perhaps associating bullet to beep is intentional ;)

Beeps from bullets

Buck Hodges — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 01:05:41 GMT

Way back near the beginning of development of TFS version control, which was called Hatteras back then,

re: How a bullet turns into a beep

kiwiblue — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 16:58:49 GMT

>> Can't reproduce on XPSP2. I'm copying

>> it into CMD.EXE console window, and

>> echo actually copies the bullet character.

> In the command window properties if the

> Font is chosen as Lucida it would print a

> bullet, otherwise if raster fonts is

> chosen it would sound a bell as Raymond

> noted.

As pointed by Johannes Rössel in 5th reply.

re: How a bullet turns into a beep

svark — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 08:57:20 GMT

>>Can't reproduce on XPSP2. I'm copying it into >>CMD.EXE console window, and echo actually >>copies the bullet character.

In the command window properties if the Font is chosen as Lucida it would print a bullet, otherwise if raster fonts is chosen it would sound a bell as Raymond noted.

re: How a bullet turns into a beep

Norman Diamond — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 07:32:57 GMT

> GetStockFont(OEM_FIXED_FONT)

I think you need to go into Control Panel and set your system's default language for non-Unicode programs. In fact even if your program IS Unicode I think you have to do that setting. I should read and experiment to see if AppLocale will take care of it. Anyway just getting the default code page changed doesn't get the default font changed.

> Type echo ^A where you actually type Ctrl+A

> where I wrote ^A. The result:

The result is a quotation mark. I think in a command prompt window the command "mode con cp select=" some number will adjust the font together with the code page.

[Sigh. "On a Windows XP machine in the default configuration for a US-English system." I assume people are smart enough to figure that out. Are you nitpicking or were you genuinely confused? I can never tell with you. -Raymond]

re: How a bullet turns into a beep

Nick — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 03:29:07 GMT

[But it doesn't go into the command history, which is might inconvenient. -Raymond]

Ah, true enough. I didn't think about that.

An alternative that does require use of HOME is to type a colon at the start of the line. It gets treated the same as a REM and does stay in the command history.

re: How a bullet turns into a beep

Nick — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:41:01 GMT

So 'echo ^D' prints a diamond. D for diamond, it all makes sense now!

Regarding andy's comment, if I want to save what I've typed at a prompt, I usually don't press HOME at all. What I do (that works with Bash and CMD) is just press CTRL-C. This cancels and gives me a new prompt, but leaves whatever I had on the previous line intact. Very handy.

[But it doesn't go into the command history, which is might inconvenient. -Raymond]

re: How a bullet turns into a beep

SM — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 22:16:58 GMT

(jim) >>"^J seems to be ignored completely ...^M is interpreted as ENTER."

That is interesting. The ^J should be a Linefeed, and ^M should be a Carriage Return. Of course, with windows files, a line ending is noted with the CR LF combination. I guess the enter key in cmd.exe only sends a CR?

re: How a bullet turns into a beep

Ben Cooke — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 21:05:17 GMT

Somehow I had completely forgotten that there were glyphs in those control characters in the olden days. You had me scratching my head for a few minutes thinking "why would a BEL be a bullet?!".

I'm sure lots of people of a suitable age remember making silly little demos/games involving those smiley face characters, the card symbols and the musical note. Those arrow characters were quite useful for scroll bars, too. I guess it would have been a waste not to use those characters for glyphs too, since those <32 values could be written to video memory just fine.

re: How a bullet turns into a beep

Nick Fitzsimons — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 20:38:50 GMT

Mike Dimmick beat me to explaining ☺, but to Carlos: CTRL-@ is equal to character code 0 (zero), which is ASCII NUL. The use of zero in C as a string terminator might have something to do with the behaviour you're seeing... or it might not :-)

If you look at an ASCII table, you can see that @ is character 64, and the action of the CTRL key is (nominally) to reset the sixth bit, so that CTRL-@ -> 0 == NUL, CTRL-A -> 1 == SOH, CTRL-G -> 7 == BEL and so forth:

http://www.asciitable.com/