unicodecharacter-encodingschemelispmit-scheme

MIT Scheme using special characters in the interpreter

I am using MIT scheme, and would like to be able to do something like this:

(define π 3.14159265)

Without having an encoding error like this:

;Illegal character: #\U+80
;To continue, call RESTART with an option number:
; (RESTART 1) => Return to read-eval-print level 1

MIT Scheme does have Unicode support, but it appears that it doesn't have support for unicode in the code, which is what I am looking to do. It turns out that ISO-8859-1 (the encoding used in MIT Scheme) does not have any greek letters within it, which is a pity.

Solutions that might work, but are not very good:

  1. Writing all of my code into text files and using the built in unicode support to read in the unicode characters as code.
  2. Rewriting the entire interpreter to accept unicode names
  3. Using a different lisp implementation which allows for Unicode names.
Solution

  • You can use unicode symbols in guile, gambit, scm, racket, and chicken for sure.