Nico--
I agree that it is very valuable to extend the character set of Maxima,
and I applaud the work you have done in that direction.
As you mention, 8-bit codes like CP1253 have serious limitations. Both
for comments and for mathematics, I agree with you that the appropriate
solution is to use a wider encoding, namely Unicode (or ISO 10646).
Unicode supports not only Greek, French, German, etc., but also
Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, etc. It also supports a wide range of
mathematical symbols and operators (as well as Greek polytoniko for
traditionalists...). Unfortunately, Unicode is apparently not supported
by GCL.
Does anyone know if there is work on supporting Unicode in GCL or other
free Common Lisps (probably using the 8-bit encoding UTF-8)?
-s