[slime-devel] Re: slime dies on printing some characters?

[T Taneli Vahakangas]

On Mon, 9 Oct 2006, Nikodemus Siivola wrote:

> T Taneli Vahakangas <vahakang at cs.helsinki.fi> writes:
> 
> > I'm a newb to lisp (using sbcl), slime and emacs, so maybe this is
> > a FAQ or some other trivia I just can't find ... anyway, doing this:
> >
> > (string #\UGARITIC_LETTER_ALPA)
> >
> > causes slime to die and complain on emacs bottom-line about:
> > error in process filter: net-read error: (end-of-file)
> >
> > If I start sbcl from the command-line it works. Most other
> > interesting characters work, like, say #\ARABIC_LETTER_HAMZA or
> > #\HEBREW_LETTER_ALEF, but for whatever reason ugaritic and some
> > others don't. I don't have a comprehensive list, but besides
> > ugaritic, at least #\LANGUAGE_TAG kills slime.
> >
> > What can be done about it? Is there a setting somewhere that
> > needs to be (un)done?
> 
> Is some Unicode characters work, and some don't then it sounds like an
> Emacs bug decoding or SBCL encoding bug to me.
> 
> What happens if you write the problematic characters into an UTF-8
> encoded file using SBCL, and then try to open it as an UTF-8 file

Writing seems to work ok; at least I can see the nice cuneiform with:
% cat ftest
... on a second thought, I will not paste the result here ...
Anyway, just take my word that this part works.

> using Emacs? Can you verify that the contents of the file are as
> expected using something other then Emacs or SBCL?

Emacs does not seem to handle the file very nicely. It just shows:
"\360\220\216\200"
which is correct in a way, but not really usable (also garbles the
console totally if started as "emacs -nw"). OTOH, other utf-8
characters (I tried japanese) seem to display correctly when read
from a file.

So, your guess about emacs seems to be right -- I can generate the
offending character and save it in a file with sbcl and cat shows
me that the character actually is there. But emacs goes haywire.
I probably need to "report-emacs-bug" or whatever.

(To the other guy suggesting (setq slime-net-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
 in .emacs: I already have that, but thanks anyway.)

	Taneli