[cffi-devel] a thought on string encodings

[Hoehle, Joerg-Cyril]

Yaroslav Kavenchuk wrote:
>>Thus (let ((custom:*foreign-encoding* charset:foo))) won't work as 
>expected, you
>It does ext:letf[*]
Thanks, Yaroslav.  I forgot about that one, which is odd since IIRC it's me who pressed Sam Steingold to explicitly mention this is the CLISP impnotes.
-- Blush.

Still I don't appreciate interfaces that need unwind-protect etc. or special variables to work. I very much prefer functional APIs.  The other ones get scoping typically wrong. Consider th effect of
(ext:letf ((custom:*foreign-encoding* charset:utf-16))
  (convert-some-string)
  (foreign-funcall some-function-which calls back into Lisp))
Within the extent of the callback, the encoding would be set to an unusual value...

Regards,
	Jorg.