[no subject]

[Masinter.pa@Xerox.COM]

Sounds like I wasn't clear enough.

When I suggested portable programs "stick within the set of standard
characters" I was referring to "the Common Lisp character set" as
defined on pp 20-21 of "Common Lisp the Language" by Guy L. Steele Jr.
as follows:

"The Common Lisp character set consists of a space character #\Space, a
newline character #\Newline, and the following ninety-four non-blank
printing characters or their equivalents..."

It looks awfully specific to me, and I'm not sure what our friends at
IBM or Japan would be chuckling about.

In reply to KMPs other points:

"It's important to distinguish between implementation dependent behavior
and unpredictable behavior. Many things in Common Lisp are conceptually
well-defined even though they vary from implementation to
implementation. For example, the behavior of (1+ MOST-POSITIVE-FIXNUM)
varies in detail  from implementation to implementation, but
conceptually it does not.  I don't think that it's inappropriate to
describe a program as having useful commands bound to keys and to tell
the user to type "?" to see a list of the commands available."

I agree whole-heartedly with this analysis and the appropriateness of
the situation you describe.

"The issue is much bigger than you make it out to be and if you claim it
to be fatal, then I claim you're attacking the whole notion of whether
CL can be portable..."

I object to your claim: I firmly believe that CL can be portable and I'm
making no such attack. That's the point of this whole discussion. I
think that this is in fact one of the few intrinsicly non-portable parts
of the language.

I agree that CHAR-BITS-LIMIT is in the same class as
"MOST-POSITIVE-FIXNUM". The issue as I see it is: does this abstraction
*encourage* or *discourage* users from writing portable programs? 

I claim that this particular feature works against portability: It is my
belief that having "char-bits" in the book will encourage users who are
working in an implementation which supports "char-bits" to rely upon
"char-bits" in their programs, with a nod to the fact "well, those
lusers without char-bits just can't use this program".

If char-bits were *not* in the standard,  then the writer of a portable
program would set aside a table somewhere, which said:

; implementation-dependent table of character codes and their functions

#\control-A  delete-next-character
#\control-R retype-line


and clearly identify that these were not "standard" (in the sense of pp
20-21) characters. Let me put it in terms of a more definite proposal in
terms of chapter and verse:

a) eliminate constants char-code-limit, char-font-limit and
char-bits-limit, and instead have a constants:

char-integer-limit		[Constant]
The value of char-integer-limit is a non-negative integer that is the
upper exclusive bound on values produced by the function char-integer.
...

string-char-integer-limit	[constant]
The value of string-char-integer-limit is the upper exclusive bound on
values produced by the funcion char-integer for characters which satisfy
string-char-p.

[Implementation note: older Common Lisps can implement this by 
(defconstant char-integer-limit (+ char-code-limit  char-font-limit
char-bits-limit)) 
(defconstant string-char-integer-limit  char-code-limit)]

b) change the wording of char-upcase and char-downcase to omit
references to "characters with non-zero bits". [note: I detect an
inconsistency in the description of char-upcase on p. 241, which in the
second paragraph says that it returns a character object with the same
font and bits attributes but with possibly a different code, and in the
last paragraph says that they have no effect on characters with non-zero
bits attributes]

c) eliminate functions char-code, char-bits, char-font, code-char,
make-char from the standard. 
[Compatibility note: users with older common lisp programs may want to
define char-code as (mod (char-int char) string-char-integer-limit)) and
similarly make the other ones as transforms on char-integers]

d) eliminate the constants char-control-bit char-meta-bit char-super-bit
char-hyper-bit  and the functions char-bit set-char-bit. [Compatibility
note: users with older common lisp programs who want to use these
features can define these constants as 1 2 4 8 respectively, and define

(defun char-bit char name
	(int-char (logtest (int-char char)
			(* string-char-integer-limit (ecase name (:control 1) (:meta 2)
...))))))