Re: [Maxima-discuss] strange error

[Andrej V. <and...@gm...>]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 9:52 PM, Leo Butler
<l_b...@us...> wrote:
> Jan Brosius <bro...@gm...> writes:
>
>> Maxima complains with the following message
>>
>> Maxima encountered a Lisp error:
>>  decoding error on stream
>>  #<SB-SYS:FD-STREAM
>>    for "file /Users/janbrosius/Dropbox/computer programs/maxima program for crystallography/crystal.mac"
>>    {1405F819}>
>>  (:EXTERNAL-FORMAT :ASCII):
>>    the octet sequence (226) cannot be decoded.
>
> Jan, I guess you are on a *nix os (e.g. mac or linux) and you are using
> wxmaxima. My guess is that wxmaxima is setting the encoding as ascii
> (:external-format :ascii). To test this, can you execute from a command
> shell
>
> maxima --batch-string="print(“here”);"
>
> If there is an error, please send the error message you see along with
> the output of
>
> printenv
>
> Otherwise, this is almost surely a bug in wxmaxima.

wxmaxima does not set the encoding. But it is true that the default
encoding for sbcl on osx is ascii. To change the encoding to unicode
put

(setf sb-impl::*default-external-format* :utf-8)

in your $HOME/.sbclrc.

Andrej