by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/04/13 14:19 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/04/13/8770668856267196376.aspx
So the folks working on the Nokia Lumia decided to have some fun on April First and they released a video about their exciting new release: MS-DOS Mobile Edition....
Great April Fools Day prank!
It didn't take long for people to realize that it didn't do very much, but people nevertheless had fun describing all of the kinda hidden tricks.
As far as I could tell, nobody described the coolest feature, one that reminded me of a bug from years ago....
Mark Zbikowski and the old lexer/parser bug that I blogged about years ago:
Ā was unexpected at this time.
Or you can go to the Internet Archive to see the art:
Ā was unexpected at this time.
The feature was something I found when seeing if the old bug fixed by Zibo stayed fixed. I simply added a keyboard layout that had LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH MACRON (Ā) aka U+0100 on it (I used Latvian!), and just typed
echo Ā
into MS-DOS Mobile Edition, and I found two things:
1) the bug did not repro, either in the original form or the lame way that other Windows Phone consoles did where it displayed Ā but would not echo it back.
2) after testing with a dozen different keyboard layouts including Thai, Lao, and Bengali, I found that any Unicode character could be typed, displayed, and echo'd properly!
Pretty cool hidden Easter egg from my colleagues over at Nokia. Now if they would just release the source so developers could do it too!