Java primitive data types

First, I have to apologize for the slow pace recently, but I've been busy at work. This situation will likely continue for another few months, but I'll do my best to progress. (Of course, by the time this is over, I'm sure something else will be competing for time, but that's life for you.) It's a little frustrating to have lots of ideas and (what at least appear at the time to be) clean designs, but not have the time to actually get them down and make them work. Well, I'll do what I can. In the meantime, back to griping about Java and explaining what I've been up to...

Just what does Java have against unsigned data types, anyway? I just finished debugging a problem that was caused by my assuming that a byte was unsigned. After all, if you're specifically choosing your data type to be a physical item, wouldn't you want it unsigned anyway? (A byte is defined in terms of the size, as opposed to int or character, where the type represents a logical item.) Well, that at least made sense to me before I wrote the code. Now I have to take each byte, and deal with casting it to a char, and then or'ing it with 0x00FF just to keep it positive. Ugh. There's gotta be a better way.

The upshot of this is that I can now see the (beginning of the) first block of a tefilla in the daavening view. Check out the dynamic Ma'ariv (last on the list). The only remaining major issue (other than actually parsing the markup to select tefillah text and include other blocks as needed) is to remove the nikud(*). In the current (e.g. legacy) setup, it was done when the file was read in, for efficiency reasons - you only need to do it once, and not every time text is shown. That doesn't work in the new model, since that will affect the distance to other characters and throw off things like if/then/else block lengths. On the other hand, I'd rather not have to
pull it out each time a line is shown. And in any case, that will be slower, and storing the extra (unneeded) characters/nikud means needing about 30% more buffer room.

(*) This was true when the post was originally written, but I've since noticed that the entire block doesn't come through. I'll be looking into that.

I don't yet have a good answer to this; at the moment, processing is done when reading in the block to transform all unwanted nikud into null bytes, which are later pulled out. But now I do twice as much work as before, so that's not a good long-term solution. But right now, I at least want to get something out that works, and then clean it up. I don't know why only part of the text block is coming through; I'll have to investigate that later. Native fonts with nikud not shown is probably broken at this point (since my emulator doesn't have native Hebrew fonts, I'm not yet testing that functionality). And I know that it is very incomplete, so don't bother filing bugs for it quite yet.