From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [r6rs-discuss] Strings Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:13:00 -0400
> Jason Orendorff wrote: > > The other solution is to standardize the implementation, so that the > > efficient algorithms don't differ. I want to push this seriously one > > last time: Unicode strings have been kicked around for a while now, > > and despite Will's link, real-world implementations do not vary much. > > I don't think it's premature to standardize. > > I started looking into these issues a while ago when we were faced with > internationalizing an app. (The app runs on several platforms and under > several web servers.) Before learning about what's out there I would have > wanted to keep my options open; knowing what I know now I'd agree with > Jason. It would make sense to standardize on UTF-16 strings and UTF-32 > characters. (Note, btw, that that doesn't preclude UTF-8 strings. It just > means that the built-in string type would be UTF-16.) I like to see Scheme being used for very long time, say, 30 years from now. We'll see big changes on hardware and possibly some new approaches in software, but I expect the fundamental idea remains same, and I'd like to code in some descendant of Scheme. And it is likely that we'll be using some descendant of Unicode, at least for data exchange; there may be some innovative approaches for text repersentation, but for data exchange, standards tend to stick. However, I feel that current state of wide acceptance of UTF-16 is more transient. It's used just because it is a good balance on current hardware and software. If we have 1000x memory, storage, and bandwidth, we may just forget surrogates complexity and use utf-32 everywhere. Or, even that "flat array of characters" model will become obsolete. So, although I think it is important not to exclude widely accepted practice, we shouldn't lock ourselves to something that happens to be popular at this moment. --shiro _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
