[pro] [Q] unicode support

[Faré]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 3:46 AM, Didier Verna <didier at lrde.epita.fr> wrote:
> does anyone have a global view on the status of unicode support in the
> main CL implementations (SBCL, CMU-CL, ECL, CCL, CLISP, ABCL, ACL,
> LispWorks). By that, I mean mostly being able to encode source files in
> utf8 with the following concerns:
>
> - do I need to do something special at the implementation-level ?
> - do I need to do something special at the ASDF system level ?
> - could this break the code of people using my libraries ?
>
So far as I can tell, all these implementations support Unicode,
though some of them can be explicitly compiled without.

ASDF, since release 2.21 (April 2012) supports Unicode.
The recommended, backwards-compatible, incantation is
(in your defsystem, or any specific component):
	#+asdf-unicode :encoding #+asdf-unicode :utf-8.

I have the intention of making utf-8 the default eventually,
but last we checked (in April this year), that would break
7 files out of all of quicklisp,
the authors of which have never replied regarding fixing them.

Also, if you (asdf:load-system :asdf-encodings) explicitly and early,
you can use :encoding :latin1, or :encoding euc-jp,
or whichever encoding your implementation supports
(asdf-encodings at this time won't transcode things for you).

An example system that explicitly uses this UTF-8 support
is lambda-reader, which I published earlier this year
(last edited in April also), based on an initial implementation
by Brian Mastenbrook.

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