On 2014-04-11, 22:57 , "Faré" fahree@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 4:32 PM, Antoniotti Marco antoniotti.marco@disco.unimib.it wrote:
I understand that my original message was not on spot. In fact I changed the subject line in my responseŠ The issue, in any case, appears to be the handling of characters nevertheless. Maybe Paul can clarify what he was really trying to do.
In any caseŠ I am the only person who thinks that a ³sub-standard² on these issues may be a Good Thing?
For basic survival, ASDF since 2.21 has support for encodings, and asdf::*utf-8-external-format* (now exported by uiop) will let you portably handle utf-8 streams (falling back to :default on 8-bit implementations). UCS-2 and UTF-16 are not universally supported, but asdf-encodings can help you find your implementation's external-format for them if available. Or for portable behavior reimplementing things the hard way, you could use either cl-unicode and flexi-streams, or babel and streams of (unsigned-byte 8).
I am aware of all the things ³out there², and yet, having a number of libraries or even a single library is not the same as ³having a standard².
If you can't convince the community to choose between babel and cl-unicode and whichever other alternatives may exist, what makes you think you can get yet another incompatible standard widely adopted? https://xkcd.com/927/
I am not advocating the proverbial 15th incompatible standard. Since by now people should know what they are doing, it would be nicer to have a document that summarized things up. Didn¹t the ANSI spec essentially came about in that way?
PS: all implementations that accept unicode accept :external-format :utf-8... except clisp, that requires you to use 'charset:utf-8. If you want to work towards a common external-format, start here
I said ³any takers?². I am just the customer telling the market what it would be nice to have :) and that is the reason why I will not build the 15th ³standard² (or the next library external encoding library). The question I am posing to the authors of the libraries you mentioned is why they don¹t sit down and write such a summary collaborative document and agree on a common interface. Of course the usual responses may be put forth (time, money or both) so my request may be moot. I am aware of that. And yet, why not asking?
Cheers ‹ MA
P.S. Networking anybody? Multiprocessing?