From: Grant Rettke <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [r6rs-discuss] Why Unicode matters Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:33:32 -0600
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 5:48 PM, John Cowan <[email protected]> wrote: > > As the R6RS process's chief Unicode hound, I'd like to say a word or > > two about why I think Unicode matters. There are at least three kinds > > of reasons. > > All good points. > > How much of a cultural shift is this for Scheme? Having been using a large character set in Scheme for almost two decades, I'd say there shouldn't be much cultural shift as far as you won't confuse character sequence and byte sequence. Distinction of textual ports and binary ports, and strings and bytevectors, in R6RS, seems a right thing to me. There are tons of hairy details, but Unicode people have thought of them carefully. Whether the language standard should mandate Unicode, or be character-set independent, is a question of a diffrent layer. Hypothetically, John's argument applies to any sufficient large-character set. I personally prefer character-set independent core, and seeing Unicode as just an instance of it. In practice, however, other large character sets (some of which include more characters than Unicode, or better compatibility to specific legacy encodings) can't compete with Unicode in terms of availability and detailed technical specifications other than codepoint definitions. In order to *exchange* portable library code, Unicode might be the only practical choice now. --shiro _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
