Re: [NTLK] How "international" is Newton OS?

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Sun Oct 21 2001 - 03:33:13 EDT


>I'm interested in this too, as I now study English, but most text is entered
>in German. I keep adding some English words to the dict. the usual way, but
>it's not really the same as a one-pack-database.
>I'm especially interested in the size of such additional dictionaries.

The dictionaries I've built are around 80-200 KB on the Newton.
They're compressed and decompressed on the fly by the system with the
usual virtual memory mechanism.

There is a German dictionary for US Newtons by PowerTrans (or was it
an English dictionary for German Newtons?). However, the technology
they use isn't the one I've described in the bowels project. They do
it the way it is documented with a little hack (like the ones I first
used for DictFr/DictNl) to have it used anywhere. In that case, the
dictionary is entirely loaded in memory (not in NewtonScript heap).
It's not really a problem on a MP2100 (I've allocated something like
2.5 MB in a program on my MP2100 without any problem), but it can be
a problem on other Newtons.
Besides, using such memory reduces the number of available free
memory pages (the heap where blocks you allocate are is grown to
satisfy your needs). This has a bad effect: the system uses free
pages for virtual memory, and if you reduce the number of pages it
can use for that, it will need more accesses to the stores.

Pfff. I'm posting too many technical posts to the list these days.

Paul

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