Scheme Reports

Scheme language standardization process

Re: [Scheme-reports] (read|write)-char [was Opinion about R7RS]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 2:57 PM, Jean-Michel HUFFLEN <jmhuffle@x> wrote:
 
    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. Encodings and error management
would be implementation-dependent, but we would have a way to get
information about what a particular implementation can provide. You
mentioned that Java and C# do not provide such functions. I would be
unhappy if I have to program my applications in Java or C#.

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.
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