Marc, what do those who want preserve the escaping of >=128 do (independent of which terminal encoding is used but for instance with -:t8)?

2015-05-30 21:57 GMT+05:30 Marc Feeley <feeley@iro.umontreal.ca>:
I have pushed a change which allows #f as the setting of the max-unescaped-char of a readtable, and it is now the default instead of (integer->char 127).  When max-unescaped-char is #f the printer will take into account the character encoding of the output port and use escapes when the character can’t be encoded.  I have also changed the default character encoding of the terminal, files, etc to use ASCII.  This setting is actually equivalent to ISO-8859-1 (latin-1) at the lowest level of the runtime system, i.e. chars are encoded using 8 bits and the top bit is significant, but the printer will use escapes when the character code is above 127 (because ASCII is a 7 bit code).

This means that when no runtime options are passed to gsi the system will escape characters exactly as before.  However, with

   gsi -:tU    (or gsi -:t8)

the system will not escape characters whose code is > 127.

For the users prefering this behavior, including you I assume, it can be made the default by setting the GAMBCOPT environment variable like this in your .profile:

  GAMBCOPT=tU

This is better than changing the readtable in the gambcini file because it will apply to all Scheme programs compiled with Gambit, not just the interpreter, and it can be overriden with an explicit -:tA when starting gsi if you want to escape non-ASCII characters in a specific situation.

Marc