Running CLISP on my system with the newtypes branch, I find that the CFFI-SYS::DEFAULT-ENCODING function is returning NIL. Some poking around reveals that CUSTOM:*FOREIGN-ENCODING* is set to #<ENCODING CHARSET:CP1252 :DOS>
I looked at the symbol values for everything in the :charset package, and they all specify :UNIX instead of :DOS and so that's what CFFI-SYS::*ENCODINGS* and CFFI-SYS::*CLISP-ENCODINGS* get populated with.
So I can see why DEFAULT-ENCODING is returning NIL. Before I head over to clisp-devel and ask about this, I just wanted to see whether this situation surprises anyone here, or if you think it might be a CLISP build configuration issue (which would be funny because I'm one of the MingW package maintainers), or ???
For instance, can anyone point me at a spot in the CLISP manual that states that *FOREIGN-ENCODING* will always correspond to the value of one of the symbols in the :charset package?
This is on WinXP SP2, CLISP 2.41 (mingw special) with nothing related to encoding for command-line arguments.