Hi,
In trying out Daniel Herring's new LibCL (http://libcl.com/) on Franz Allegro CL, I noticed something about LISP-VERSION-STRING which is in asdf-binary-locations, which evidently borrowed it from SLIME.
There are actually four Lisp executables that come in an Allegro distribution, that differ in two orthogonal dimensions. One dimension, which LISP-VERSION-STRING accounts for, is the case mode, "ANSI" or "modern". The other is 8-bit strings vs. 16-bit strings; I noticed that LISP-VERSION-STRING doesn't take this into account (but the fasls are indeed incompatible). The 16-bit executables are the default; the other two have "8" appended to their names.
Here is a suggestion for the Allegro code in LISP-VERSION-STRING to reflect this distinction.
#+allegro (format nil "~A~A~A~A" excl::*common-lisp-version-number* ; ANSI vs MoDeRn ;; thanks to Robert Goldman and Charley Cox for ;; an improvement to my hack (if (eq excl:*current-case-mode* :case-sensitive-lower) "M" "A") ;; Note if 8-bit strings (if (code-char 256) "" "8") (if (member :64bit *features*) "-64bit" ""))
This is backward-compatible for users of 16-bit strings. Since there probably aren't many users of 8-bit strings, the impact will be minimal.
-- Scott