On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:39:40 +0100, "Dave Pawson" dave.pawson@gmail.com wrote:
xml has long dealt with 'strings of characters' encoded in utf-8.
I think you are confused. In Lisp, characters and strings are really characters and strings.
CL-USER 4 > #\ä #\ä
CL-USER 5 > (type-of *) CHARACTER
CL-USER 6 > (char-name **) "Latin-Small-Letter-A-With-Diaeresis"
If you want to convert between octets and characters (that's where encodings like UTF-8 make sense), most CL implementations have facilities for this out of the box. For portable solutions see for example here:
http://weitz.de/flexi-streams/ http://common-lisp.net/project/babel/
That way I can include an umlaut, an arabic glyph or a chinese symbol
See above.
Any reason lisp should not enjoy that level of internationalisation?
It does already.
HTH, Edi.