[slime-devel] Re: sbcl regression with slime

[Daniel Pittman]

On 21 Nov 2004, Christophe Rhodes wrote:
> Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> writes:
>
>> On 20 Nov 2004, Christophe Rhodes wrote:
>>> Helmut Eller <e9626484 at stud3.tuwien.ac.at> writes:
>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Thank you.  What Lisp support do you need to support other external
>>> formats?  A lisp-side understanding of the emacs multibyte system?
>>>
>>> If so, where is emacs-mule-unix documented?
>>
>> `emacs-mule' is an internal coding system -- *not* something that you
>> really want to use for communications between (X)Emacs and another
>> process.
>
> Maybe -- but, unless I read Helmut's work wrongly, it's also the only
> way of communicating the full space of characters to Emacs

I suspect this to be true, at least for XEmacs.  I last used that four
or five months ago, so my knowledge is less strong after that, but at
the time, IIRC, a couple of encodings like Ethiopic and some of the
forms of CKJ were not fully supported.

> -- that is, Helmut's message strongly implied to me that current
> released versions of the emacsen do not support utf-8 communications
> in any useful way. Is this correct?

No.  MULE-UCS, or Emacs 21.1, give you "good enough" UTF-8 support for
most practical purposes.  Obviously, since both are a mapping layer over
the internal MULE encoding, that are not completely perfect.

I don't seriously expect anything to change here until the release of an
internally Unicode Emacs, or XEmacs.  At present, the GNU project seems
to be closer, but both teams have working prototype code AFAIK.[1]

Regards,
        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  I don't follow internal XEmacs development any longer, since around
     four or five months ago, so things may have changed there.

-- 
Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure. 
        -- Karl Krauss