International Character Sets
1 Introduction
Liquid Common Lisp has been upgraded to support international character sets, including double-byte character sets. This change allows Liquid Common Lisp to provide larger, multiple character sets whose characters are still uniquely encoded. Developers can now write applications that process and display foreign characters, such as Japanese Kanji characters, or specialized characters, such as scientific characters. Incorporating characters from foreign languages poses several problems in Common Lisp. Some languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, contain more characters than does the English alphabet. Larger character sets require more complex character encoding schemes, such as multibyte characters, and a more complex character type hierarchy, which can affect the efficiency of string and character operations.
Because applications written for international use must often support more than one language, character and string manipulations should operate uniformly on all character objects, regardless of the character set.
To address these problems, Liquid Common Lisp has been upgraded with the following considerations:
- A double-byte character is considered a single character object so that it can be treated in the same manner as existing alphanumeric characters.
- The upgraded version of the software performs all string and character operations efficiently.
- The modifications are consistent and compatible with Common Lisp.
- 1.1 - Summary of software changes
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- 1.2 - Definition of terms
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- 1.3 - Notational conventions and syntax
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International Character Sets - 9 SEP 1996 Generated with Harlequin WebMaker