Ray Dillinger wrote: > The point about strings having formerly enjoyed a 4:1 storage > advantage (8 vs. 32 bits) and 21-bit characters being a better fit to > 32-bit words? Firstly, irrelevant. Small scheme should > be about semantics, not about hardware. Secondly, incorrect. The > primary encoding used by Operating Systems and underlying libraries is > UTF8, which still enjoys a 4:1 storage advantage > for most strings. Thirdly, it's growing more incorrect. Since new > computers these days use 64-bit pointers, the advantage of packed UTF8 > strings over general vectors is rapidly shifting to > 8:1.
This is all true, and I'm a big fan of UTF8, but string-set! is especially difficult (and inefficient) to provide for UTF8 strings. Wanting the space advantages of UTF8 is a reason to prefer immutable strings. I feel like this is what John's point meant; that implementations with Unicode and a fast string-set! would probably be using 32 bits (or 16 bits) per character. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
