[Lisp-cffi-qt4-list] Unicode

[Radoslav A. <rsd...@gm...>]

Hi, Paul :)

What about Unicode support in lisp-cffi-q4?
You see, I'm a Bulgarian student in Germany, and currently I'm learning 
greek :-D Even for simple notes I need some Unicode support...

AFAIK Qt4 has a mature Unicode support. There are CL implementations 
with good Unicode support. So what could break the flow is either CFFI 
or lisp-cffi-qt4. I spent a little time trying to understand what about 
CFFI, but I couldn't, so I decided just to try.

What I tried is the following:
As I work on Windows, I had to choose CLisp as an implementation, as ECL 
is still not quite Unicode compliant. I had to use 2.38, because the 
last one (2.41) had some problems loading "qt.lisp", probably with CFFI 
... (On 2.38 lisp-cffi-qt4 works just fine, at least the simple tests.)

I tried this (having UTF-8 encoded file utf.txt, containing Bulgarian, 
German and Greek words on its first line):
> (load "asdf")
> (load "qt")
>
> (defpackage qt-user (:use cl qt))
> (in-package qt-user)
>
> (defvar *unicode-string* nil)
> (let ((custom:*default-file-encoding* charset:utf-8))
>     (with-open-file (f "utf.txt")
>         (setf *unicode-string* (read-line f))))
>         
> (with-qt ()
>     (object lb `(label ,*unicode-string*)))
(All CLisp guru's, excuse my ignorance of a better way to write the code 
above...)

And got:
> ...
> ;;   Loaded file 
> D:\Opt\Lisp\qt\exe\clisp\examples\cffi\src\foreign-vars.fas
> 0 errors, 0 warnings
> ;;  Loaded file D:\Opt\Lisp\qt\exe\clisp\examples\qt.lisp
> *** - 1087 cannot be converted to the foreign type FFI:UCHAR
> The following restarts are available:
> ...
Of what I see, I can suppose that (at least CLisp's mplementation of) 
CFFI doesn't support Unicode. Am I right, or the way lisp-cffi-qt4 uses 
CFFI is not Unicode compliant?

Regards,
Rado