The value of this variable must be a locale object. Its initial value
is the default locale based on the Lisp process' external locale
setting (see The
initial locale when Allegro CL starts up in
iacl.htm). The locale object which is the value of
excl:*locale* is referred to as the current
locale. excl:*locale* is similar (in usage) to
*package*. It can be
bound while evaluating code for a different locale.
In Allegro CL 6.0, the current locale is only used to determine the
default external-format. Nothing else within Allegro CL 6.0 uses or
depends on *locale*,
although future releases may expand on how *locale* is used.
Examples:
The Polish locale, "pl", uses the Latin-2 character set; and the US
English locale, "en_US", uses the Latin-1 character set. The octet
value #xa3 represents a different external-format character in each
character set. Rebinding excl:*locale* as shown
below alters the default external-format conversion behavior.
user(22): (let ((excl:*locale* (find-locale "pl")))
(schar (octets-to-string (coerce
'(#xa3)
'(array (unsigned-byte 8))))
0))
#\latin_capital_letter_l_with_stroke
user(23): (let ((excl:*locale* (find-locale "en_US")))
(schar (octets-to-string (coerce
'(#xa3)
'(array (unsigned-byte 8))))
0))
#\pound_sign
General information on international character set support in Allegro CL is in iacl.htm. See particularly Locales in that document.
The documentation is described in introduction.htm and the index is in index.htm.
Copyright (c) 1998-2000, Franz Inc. Berkeley, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
Created 2000.10.5.