🚀 go-pugleaf

Unfortunately posting news from this system has been broken for a couple
of months and no one knew it, so my posts on this issue ended up in the
proverbial bit bucket.

It turned out to be a trivial task to add the ability for 8 bit characters
to Xlisp-plus 2.1d since all 256 character values were supported virtually
everywhere anyway. Another couple of hours added the ability to handle
uppercase vs. lowercase where appropriate. Total additional code was 500
bytes including the new "ctype" table.

With the changes (which apply to the PC only), character codes 128-254 are
valid symbol constituent characters, work correctly in all the character
predicates, are handled properly by the *readtable-case* and *print-case*,
and are printed without special escapes alone and in strings.

In the next couple of weeks I will have version 2.1e ready for distribution.
I will put up a posting at that time, so don't ask about availability yet.

One major change in the new version is that fixnums (and ratios) do not
silently overflow anymore, but are coerced into flonums. This is still not
compatible with Common Lisp, but is a major improvment given the lack of
bignums. (Anyone want to volunteer adding bignums??)

-- 
Tom Almy
toma@sail.labs.tek.com
Standard Disclaimers Apply