Re: [Gcl-devel] utf8 and emacs text/string multibyte representation

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!  One other thing -- any opinions on using locales and wchar_t
for conversions?

Is there really any other (than utf-8) external encoding that needs
support in a common lisp, practically speaking?

Take care,

Carl Shapiro <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 11:20 AM, Camm Maguire <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>     It really appears that unicode refers more to a glyph than anything
>     else.  If we follow your suggestions, and leave characters 8-bit, aref
>     random O(1) access, is there any utility to providing unicode functions
>     #'glyph-length or some such in a common lisp implementation?
>
> Yes, a Common Lisp character is a UTF-8 code unit.  As such, (length "א") 
> would return 2 in GCL whereas it returns 1 in CMUCL.
>
> For iterating across strings in ways other than by UTF-8 code unit, you will 
> want to provide an iterators for iterating by code point, by glyph,
> and so forth.
>
> In theory, something like CL-UNICODE would provide that but I think its 
> really lacking in a number of important ways.  GCL being what it is, you
> could link against ICU and use their functions to start with.
>

-- 
Camm Maguire                                        address@hidden
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