Re: Coercing pointers

On Thu, 14 Aug 2003 12:08:53 -0600, Kevin Rosenberg <kevin-HJRc7zDS/[email protected]> wrote:

> I suppose their justification is their is no concept of an unsigned
> character in lisp.

Hehe, OK.

> Hmm, what's so bad about
> #+lispworks
> (defmacro ensure-char-character (obj)
>   `(if (characterp ,obj) ,obj (code-char ,obj)))
> 
> Just the run-time overhead? I think that I'm happy enough with this
> on Lispworks as I don't know of a better way to regularize their
> difference of dereferencing a :char and :unsigned-char.

That's fine with me. I usually value correctness and convenience over
speed. If you really want to optimize the hell out of your FFI stuff
you probably won't use a cross-platform toolkit like UFFI.

> We can still add the deref-char-pointer to provide an optimized
> dereferencing returning a lisp character.

Yes, that would be good to have as an option.

Cheers,
Edi.