Scheme language standardization process
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 07/14/2012 04:04 PM, Arthur A. Gleckler wrote: > On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 2:57 PM, Jean-Michel HUFFLEN >> Let us go back to characters. You do not want to give any >> priviledge to a particular encoding. OK. How can I write >> portable code, running on several interpreters? Some characters >> may be not included in the encoding used for writing characters. >> How can I make sure that I will avoid errors? For me, if I had: - >> a function returning the default encoding used, - a function >> returning the available encodings, I would be the happiest >> programmer. > I like the idea, but that's exactly the kind of thing that should > be in the larger Scheme specified by working group two, not in the > smaller Scheme standard we're working on at the moment. Things > like first-class representations for character encodings are like > yarn -- if you keep pulling, eventually the whole sweater is > undone. It seems to me that we should not be thinking about the encoding of characters, regardless of small or large lang, until it is time to do I/O. While processing strings with scheme code, it is sufficient to consider a string as a sequence of characters. If you are worried about the encoding, it's because you're doing something that does not use the string as a sequence of characters, like being worried about the layout of bits in bignums. It is at the interfaces to the outside world that encoding becomes important; when we have a bunch of bits that we've read from a binary port and we want to convert it into a string value, or when we have to write a string that something which reads in a particular encoding will understand, or etc. That said, it is reasonable to wish for a way of knowing whether a particular character is in the repertoire that can be encoded/decoded by an encoding. Bear -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJQAwylAAoJEAOzWkqOibfNtHgH+wfpdyG11lWWBDsCFcn61JSF PiA5LviPpoU8zU3Vhn9llCwQ3SxnbCZDj9ZvozVhpeBsjDMUSoNoqj0W+iVpVG6G NS7Obi/chdEIpMs33BsKeQyWJ/T09dzZm/fuMCJh1sul/u9YLo8jOGgq2CAxo857 g+CsutixBLWBtiesrPm3JD+Er0O1G/ENroaFS+3STRRtr9TK+EU8GvJgMLTdLHS6 XNzac18NDpJhZjeCDgV9XoRWNfC9o7WJUWp9mlFPLT6RIS5KKBIKvUCQLudhnMI4 QMhdGoNI5slT8qOLEUuF7uZe/w+Hvu59TDYpMl9yOj9aal5TKLxUqT+cmPoNy+8= =DYN3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list Scheme-reports@x http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports