`bandwidth' of Allegro CL -- Emacs interface

[oe@dfki.uni-sb.de (Stephan Oepen)]

dear friends,

we are running Allegro CL with {GNU Emacs | Epoch} interface version
2.0.4 from Epoch 4.2 _with_ EIGHT_BIT_KEYBOARD (or whatever that
variable was called) defined.  --- hence, when using fonts with
appropriate iso 8859/1 encoding Epoch can input and display 8 bit
characters.

among other things, we are doing german morphology in our system
(remember: `ue' and `sz' in ``es mueszte gehen'' usually are single
characters over here |:-) so that it would be kind of useful to be able
to input those to Allegro CL (which itself seems to be perfectly happy
about 8 bit characters though as far as i know there is nothing really
requesting that capability in CLtL2).

the default of course was to not have it work (on input through Epoch
bit 7 got stripped --- input from file and output worked fine); after
forcing Epoch to settle the communication channel on pipes instead of
on ptys (by setting `process-connection-type' to nil) things seem to
work fine.

so, i figure there is something affecting only the input in ptys (or
does the printout from the lisp world come back to Epoch some other
way) --- anyone out there with a reasonable explanation?  (oh, yes:
stty(1) tells me the pty is setup `cs8', no parity, `-strip'.)

however, the main question remains: do i loose any of the Allegro --
{GNU Emacs | Epoch} interface capabilities when running on pipes?

                                                   thanx  -  oe

btw: as long as we are awaiting bash 1.13 ... is there a decent shell
that can handle 8 bit input yet?

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;;; Stephan Oepen, Duerkheimer Str. 7, 66oo Saarbruecken, (o681) - 3o2 52 84
;;;      - oe@dfki.uni-sb.de | oe@cs.tu-berlin.de | oe@gnu.ai.mit.edu -
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