> From: Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> > Cc: guile-user@gnu.org > Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2015 21:18:28 +0200 > > Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org>: > > >> From: Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> > >> The Linux kernel just doesn't care, and shouldn't. > > > > Guile is not an OS kernel. Guile is an environment for writing > > applications. On the application level, you _should_ care, or else you > > won't be able to manipulate file names in meaningful ways. > > To me, a programming language is a medium of writing programs for an > operating system. I don't think a programming language should "shield" > me from the OS. Instead, it should make the whole gamut of the OS > facilities available to me.
I see no contradiction here, as long as you acknowledge that Guile should be good for more than just OS level stuff. > >> I'm not saying bytevectors are elegant, but we should not replace > >> them with wishful thinking. > > > > No need for wishful thinking. Study what Emacs does and do something > > similar. > > Why don't you tell me already what emacs does? I did, you elided that. It represents text as superset of UTF-8, and uses high codepoints above the Unicode space for raw bytes. > >> Guile 1.x's and Python 2.x's bytevector/string confusion was actually > >> a very happy medium. Neither the OS nor the programming language > >> placed any interpretation to the byte sequences. That was left to the > >> application. > > > > And that is wrong. Applications cannot handle that, they need some > > heavy help from the infrastructure. > > That can be managed through support libraries. Guile is one huge support library, so it should include that built-in.