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To be able to communicate to the external world, CMUCL supports
external formats to convert to and from the external world to
CMUCL’s string format. The external format is specified in several
ways. The standard streams *standard-input*,
*standard-output*, and *standard-error* take the format
from the value specified by *default-external-format*. The
default value of *default-external-format* is :utf-8. The
external formats :iso8859-1, :ascii, :default, and
:locale are built-in.
The format :default isn’t a specific format. It means to use the
external format specified by *default-external-format*.
Likewise the format :locale is not a specific format either. It
means to use the format obtained from the locale setting.
For files, OPEN takes the :external-format
parameter to specify the format. The default external format is
:default.