[Openmcl-devel] Unicode in OpenMCL

[Andrew P. Lentvorski, Jr.]

On Jun 23, 2004, at 1:00 PM, Gary Byers wrote:

> I think that it would be bad to have EXTENDED-CHAR (basically, bad to
> have more than one type of CHARACTER); it makes more sense to me to
> make all CHARACTERs (BASE-CHARs) and make CHAR-CODE-LIMIT be 2^24
> or so (I think that Unicode 4 needs about 21 bits to natively encode
> any character.)

I can't seem to find it, but I seem to recall a discussion about this 
on one of the Lisp Wikis.

The general consensus was that adding Unicode to the basic character 
type was a bad idea because ASCII can make certain guarantees that 
Unicode cannot.  Collation sequence and canonical representation being 
the ones I can remember (ie. characters have order and a set of 
characters is defined by one and only one bytestream).

I am in favor of some form of Unicode string.  However, the notion of a 
"character" in Unicode is a very fuzzy thing.

-a