Re: [Axiom-developer] [Maxima] [Gcl-devel] GCL 2.6.8 and 2.6.9 are released

[Leo Butler]

   From: Henry Baker <address@hidden>

   UTF8 isn't 'critical', but not having it means that interfacing with
   file systems & documents that utilize UTF8 is quite difficult.

Henry, I don't know if the following answers your question, but I do
suspect you and Camm have different ideas of what 'handling' utf8
means. It may be that for your purposes, it handles them well enough.

This is from gcl 2.6.9 ansi from the debian testing repo:

>(with-open-file (χ-stream "αβγ.txt" :direction :output :if-exists :supersede 
>:if-does-not-exist :create) (format χ-stream "αβγ"))

NIL

>(with-open-file (χ-stream "αβγ.txt" :direction :input) (read-line χ-stream nil 
>nil))

"αβγ"
T

>(coerce (symbol-name 'χ) 'list)

(#\\317 #\\207)

SBCL, by contrast, yields:

* (coerce (symbol-name 'χ) 'list)

(#\GREEK_CAPITAL_LETTER_CHI)

In case the mail server or client corrupts the message, gcl is
interning a symbol with a non-ascii char and it is creating a file
with non-ascii chars in its name and successfully writing to and
reading from that file.

I have been using maxima+{gcl,ecl,sbcl,cmucl} plus this hack

https://github.com/leo-butler/utf8-hack

to use utf8 chars in maxima. This works fine in emacs and (sort of) in
xmaxima.  Wxmaxima does not display wide chars correctly and I have
not chased a solution.

Leo