Dear Slimers,

I've implemented support for Lispworks in slime so that all characters exchanged between emacs and lispworks are LW:SIMPLE-TEXT-STRING (vectors of LW:SIMPLE-CHAR) which allow one to directly send and receive korean, japanese etc characters from the REPL, and to hit C-c C-c on a utf-8 encoded file w/o blowing up the slime connection.

Example transcript:

XOS> (ui:caption 'are-you-sure-to-proceed) "계속 하시겠습니까?" XOS> (type-of *) LISPWORKS:SIMPLE-TEXT-STRING

Limitations:

* You MUST have set your lispworks to use LW:SIMPLE-CHAR by default. (see LW:SET-DEFAULT-CHARACTER-ELEMENT-TYPE)

For us, this is done at time of delivery for the text console that we use to connect slime to.

* You MUST be in an image where a recent FLEXI-STREAMS is loaded (i.e. :FLEXI-STREAMS must be on the features list.) Failure to satisfy this reverts you to the previous, broken behaviour. :-)

* Only 1 type of connection to lispworks is allowed; i.e. you can't have one latin-1 and one utf-8 connection simultaneously. This is because I couldn't find out how to inspect the current connection to determine what external-format it had been opened with. Maybe somebody can fix this.

* You can then set your emacs with this (setq slime-net-coding-system 'utf-8-unix) and have a UTF-8 interaction with lispworks.

This patch is taken against a (very recent) tip checkout, and should apply cleanly, I hope.

Cheers!

Alain Picard