levels of interpretation of characters

[masinter]

The long discussions about EOL's points to some needed explanations of handling of characters, encodings, streams, stream modes. I wish there were some document about these implementation issues, because they are still current. Yes, the world has converged on UTF-8 more or less, But there are still issues about normalization and the use of emoji.

I was involved in the Common Lisp character sub-committee of X3J13. Medley's implementation preceded other Lisp's handling of extended character sets, with assistance from Joe Becker, who helped with the Xerox Character Code Standard (XCCS) and later with Unicode.

Interlisp-D's systems were developed when there was an idea of shared sources with Interlisp-10 and Interlisp-VAX.