Beeps from bullets

Buck Hodges

Way back near the beginning of development of TFS version control, which was called Hatteras back then, we sent email to the team manually when we checked in.  So I would typically write my checkin comment in Outlook, which was using Microsoft Word as the editor, and then paste it into the checkin dialog.  My comment was a bulleted list of the changes that I made.  I would start with an asterisk, and Word would convert it to a bullet.  Later, viewing the changeset details on the command line would produce beeps.  I knew that the Unicode bullet character was being converted to a BEL (0x07) character, but I didn’t know how the conversion worked.

Raymond Chen’s recent post, How a bullet turns into a beep, provides the details on how the conversion happens, changing the Unicode bullet into a beep.

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