[slime-devel] Re: sbcl regression with slime

[Helmut Eller]

I added support for multibyte coding systems.  The new magic variable
is slime-net-coding-system.  Currently there are 3 possible values for
the coding system: iso-8859-1-unix, utf-8-unix, and emacs-mule-unix.
At startup, Emacs tells the Lisp implementation which coding system to
use and same encoding is used for the rest of the session.  Not all
Lisps implementations support all coding systems.  The situations is
as follows:

  CMUCL, OpenMCL: support only iso-8859-1-unix.
  SBCL, CLISP: can be used with iso-8859-1-unix or utf-8-unix.
  Allegro: supports all three.
  
  LispWorks and ABCL support only iso-8859-1-unix because I didn't
  know how to set the external-format for socket streams in those
  Lisps.

Of course, the Emacs version must support the coding system too.  GNU
Emacs 20 and 21 support emacs-mule.  utf-8 is probably only available
in CVS Emacs or CVS XEmacs.  AFAIK, no XEmacs has no support for
emacs-mule.

If you use a multibyte encoding in GNU Emacs, it is important that you
set default-enable-multibyte-characters to t.  That's default, so most
people don't have to worry about it.

No change is needed for people who don't care about multibyte
characters.  Everything should work as before (modulo bugs).

Helmut.