Hi Robert!
>>BTW, I already observed some problems with describe
>>on clisp and sbcl. It seems that now describe
>>in Maxima CVS is completely broken - clisp 2.36,
>>sbcl 0.9.5 (linux). At least I can't make it work.
>
>
> Can you be more specific about the problem?
> I have updated from current cvs and rebuilt w/ sbcl 0.9.4
> and clisp 2.34 and I find in both cases that describe
> works OK. Also describe works OK for gcl 2.6.7.
>
After some more testing I've finally got
pretty clear idea what is going on wrong.
If I execute Maxima build with LANG=C
LANG=C make
LANG=C make install
then describe works perfectly well
on all 4 lisps - clisp, gcl, cmucl and sbcl.
But if I just do
make
make install
in my current locale (ru_RU.KOI-8) then
I get troubles with describe on clisp
and sbcl. The point is that makeinfo
is locale-sensitive. In spite of fact
that documentation is in English it
inset some phrases in local language.
For example the very first line of
maxima.info which reads
This is maxima.info, produced by makeinfo ...
in Russian locale is replaced by appropriate
Russian translation. In this case *.info contain
not only Latin-1 characters and clisp/sbcl
don't like it. Symptoms are different.
For example sbcl complains that some #\X
(where X is Russian char) is not of type
base-char.
So cl-info.lisp needs some modification to work
with non Latin-1 texts on all lisps. This is
absolutely necessary for non Latin-1 languages.
But this modification can be done later since at
present we support only Latin-1 languages.
On the other hand it is important to mention
somewhere in README that Maxima must be built
in C locale.
--
Vadim V. Zhytnikov