[slime-devel] Coding systems and .slime-history.eld

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

Of course I had to start playing with utf-8-unix as the coding system
for communications between emacs/slime and the sbcl backend, and of
course I had to test it by trying some commands with non-latin-1
characters in them.  Everything went fine until I quit slime, when it
wanted to save the history to .slime-history.eld with the latin-1
charset (I have not yet converted to utf-8 for everything I do).

This failed of course, which makes me wonder whether
slime-repl-save-history ought to have anticipated this problem, and
specified the coding system, perhaps to be the same as communicating
with the lisp?  Of course, slime-repl-read-history-internal runs into
the same snag.

I could fix this for my own part by adding ("\\.eld$" . utf-8) to
file-coding-system-alist or some other trick like that, or even moving
to utf-8 as the default coding for all operations, by setting
coding-system-for-write and coding-system-for-read both to utf-8.  But
slime users should not be forced to such measures just because they
use utf-8 to talk to their lisp.

- Harald