On Sun, 2009-09-20 at 22:19 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote: > Isn't it true that the "more general" uses of strings would > all be equally or better served by binary buffers (bytevectors, > uniform numeric vectors, whatever)?
I don't think so. For example, I like the idea of using codepoints with buckybits as the names of keyboard events. It's a parsimonious choice because it gives me a human-friendly print/read syntax for individual events and sequences of events. I can sort a set of strings representing key sequences using string<?. Compare two for equality using string=? or string=-ci? Take substrings. Concatenate strings. Even upcasing and downcasing are useful. I'm inclined to think of the string-* operations as (ideally extensible) generics. > I don't know about you but I *do* regard strings primarily as > text intended for human readability and to be manipulated in > linguistically (or at least character-oriented) significant > ways. Whenever I find myself doing something else with one, > I realize that I am no longer using it as a string. What counts as a linguistic use gets a bit fuzzy, though, as the example of keysequences shows. -t On Sun, 2009-09-20 at 22:19 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote: > On Sun, 2009-09-20 at 12:17 -0700, Thomas Lord wrote: > > On Sun, 2009-09-20 at 08:56 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote: > > > > This is why I believe that the best semantics for string-length, > > > indexes in strings, etc, is that they should count characters > > > rather than codepoints. And this is one of the things that I > > > believed then and still believe now that R6RS got wrong. > > > > That's a reasonable view when a string is being regarded > > primarily as human text to be manipulated in linguistically > > significant ways. Strings as a data structure are more > > general than that, though. > > Isn't it true that the "more general" uses of strings would > all be equally or better served by binary buffers (bytevectors, > uniform numeric vectors, whatever)? > > I don't know about you but I *do* regard strings primarily as > text intended for human readability and to be manipulated in > linguistically (or at least character-oriented) significant > ways. Whenever I find myself doing something else with one, > I realize that I am no longer using it as a string. > > Bear > > _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
