Subject: Re: unicode
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 2000/06/21
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3170598344242639@naggum.no>

* Marco Antoniotti <marcoxa@parades.rm.cnr.it>
| Well, Bruno mentioned CHAR-WIDTH and STRING-WIDTH.

  From the names, I guess these are relics of coding systems.  If you
  think you need to work with coding systems, you are mistaken.  If
  you still think you need to work with coding systems, measuring the
  width of characters in bytes is wrong.

| He also mentioned the treatment of :EXTERNAL-FORMAT.

  The various external-formats you will need in the complex world of
  universal character sets are not covered by the standard.  Nor
  should they.  There are, however, several conflicting attempts to
  enumerate them outside of the Lisp world, and it is not necessarily
  useful to standardize on one of those.

| Does ACL have these functions?

  I hope to <deity> that there won't be any char-width or similar
  cruftitude in Allegro 6.0.  If anything, we should have learned from
  the Great Emacs Experience that exposing coding systems internals to
  users is Just Plain Wrong.

#:Erik
-- 
  If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.