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 there were a single open-source go-to library, and it were stable, that would be a *de facto* standard that you could then codify. But then, the advantages of the codification would be dubious, since you already have the library, and all the codification creates is opportunity for divergently buggy reimplementations.
IETF requires two independent interoperating implementations before it declares a standard adopted. What does interoperating means here? The two libraries must use the same package? That's conflict. Different packages but the same symbol names? That's not interoperation.
There's no way to win this standardization game.
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?
CL was standardized by trying to compromise between existing implementations; that was both its success (starting from something that exists, and making it converge a bit) and its limitation (with the horrible practice of underspecified functionality, which creates as many portability landmines).
If you want to restart a similar process, good luck trying to put the developers of these implementations on the same mailing-list: maintained: abcl allegro ccl clisp cmucl lispworks mkcl sbcl semi-maintained: ecl gcl scl in development: clasp mocl sacla unmaintained: corman genera mcl xcl
Back in the days, there was were big customers and the threat of reduced DARPA funding that put everyone in the same room. No such incentive today.
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?
Well, given enough million dollars, I'm sure you can convince people to sit in the same room. Not that I would recommend that as a good investment.
P.S. Networking anybody? Multiprocessing?
iolib? lparallel?
How many man-years of lisp experts would you fund to quibble over language lawyering vs actually improving those libraries?
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org So capitalism has been making everyone poorer for centuries? How fabulously rich our ancestors must have been before all this destruction!