On Mon, 2009-08-24 at 16:39 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> As you know, I'd like to see characters flushed from Scheme and all
> other languages. That's not practical, though, given the high barriers
> to removing IEEE Scheme features from small Scheme.
I agree in principle; characters in Unicode do not behave in the
well-ordered ways that made the distinction between characters and
strings seem useful in IEEE Scheme. There was an unspoken
assumption that we were talking exclusively about environments
with ASCII-like encodings, which has turned out recently to be
false.
It would be better to abandon the idea of characters as separate
from strings. What is a character, after all? It's a string of
length one. And what consistent semantics are provided by our
character-specific functions that aren't visibly redundant with
the semantics of string functions? Approximately none. So yeah,
there's a point here to be made about characters being a fundamentally
flawed notion in the presence of unicode environments.
In practice, I don't know if we can do this. It would break
so much existing scheme code.
Bear
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