Re: [QUERY] Support Unicode escapes in the Lisp reader, à la Java

Aidan> I think triggering an error for that should be done in Aidan> Funicode_to_char, not in the Lisp reader. That way it would Aidan> be available to all the Unicode-oriented coding systems. You're right. I guess I'm on the side of two syntaxes then, and I still prefer fixed width because I don't want to have to remember to write \u00DEADBEEF instead of \uDEADBEEF just because A happens to be a hex digit. It occurs to me that in Unicode we can restrict \U to 6 hex digits. We might still want to use ISO-10646 Groups 01-7F internally for something though; I suppose it would be useful to have an escape for that. Aidan> I think that the earlier we introduce it, the better. Look Aidan> how long it’s taken for people to adapt #x in Lisp code, Aidan> and that was a function of the date of introduction of the Aidan> syntax first in XEmacs and then in GNU Emacs. If GNU Emacs already has it, OK. Otherwise, that argument says "Nobody will use it until GNU has it, anyway...." Note that converting the Lisp sources to Unicode can be done in 21.5 at any time. (At the price of inventing some syntax to signal it, because doing it in the packages is another matter.) -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.