revised describe function now on cvs branch

Hi Vadim,

> Just build and install maxima with sbcl and/or clisp and
> with all four --enable-lang enabled.  Then try something like
> LANG=es_ES konsole
> or
> LANG=es_ES.UTF-8 konsole
> Run installed maxima in this console.
> You may compare describe-index.lisp in es/pt vs es.utf8/pt.utf8.
> UTF-8 versions looks almost perfectly OK numbers are weird.

I tried "LANG=es_ES.UTF-8 konsole" but Maxima didn't notice the LANG
setting. However Maxima does show Spanish-language text when I execute

LANG=es_ES.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE=es_ES.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=es_ES.UTF-8
LC_ALL=es_ES.UTF-8 xterm     -fn
'-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1'

I see the behavior you mentioned -- ? FOO shows text for some item
other than FOO.

I am pretty sure that this is caused in large part because,
it appears, the makeinfo tag table tells character offsets,
not byte offsets. (There is no documentation on this point.)
That causes problems when using a multi-byte character set.

I was assuming the table is a byte offset table. Instead of reading
the makeinfo tag table, I'll try to construct a byte offset table by hand.

There is a related problem, that the texts shown are a little bit
too long -- this is also a byte vs character problem.

best,
Robert