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 response… 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 case… I am the only person who thinks that a “sub-standard” 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).
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/
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
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org #.(let((q`(#0=lambda(q)(labels((p(q)(if(atom q)(intern(#1=reverse(string q)))(#1#(mapcar #'p q))))(q(q)(subst q(eq q q)'(#2=defun p(&aux #2#nufed ,@''#3=etouq(xua& #3#)p tsil)((#0#(q)(setq q 't tsil q nufed(eval(list q (list'quote q)))))#3#)))))(nconc(q q)(p(q q)))))))(eval`(,q',q)))