> When I ran your program in Clisp, it complained about the accented
> letter i in the comment above, and the Maxima parser got stuck there
> and just endlessly printed an error message about a undefined
> character sequence or something. (I guess the locale is UTF-8 and the
> bytes corresponding to accented i don't encode any character in that
> locale ... I'm no expert about that.)
>
I usually avoid writing Maxima files with accented characters. It's a
source of problems when other users want to work with them under other
encodings.
I don't know much about this, but I think that standard characters are
encoded the same way both in utf-8 and iso-8859-15, so that encoding
doesn't matter in this context. Problems begin when one writes special
letters.
Mario