From: Brian Harvey <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [r6rs-discuss] Proposed features for small Scheme, part 2 bis: I/O Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:22:47 -0700
> > however, the history shows people > > tended to use read-char and write-char (with char->integer > > and integer->char) to pretend binary I/O, which got broken > > beyond ASCII/ISO8859 world. > > The WG1 draft charter allows for the possibility of both ASCII-only and > Unicode-aware implementations of small Scheme. This is one of a bunch of > engineering decisions that depend, it seems to me, on what we expect to be > the more common kind of implementation. If in fact most implementors will > be either WG2/Unicode or WG1/ASCII, then we might want different defaults > for port behavior in WG1 and WG2. If in practice most implementations, even > of WG1, are going to be Unicode-aware, then we have to bite the bullet and > have more complicated ideas about WG1 ports. > > Unicode is /so/ hairy that, were there no political considerations, it would > be high on my list of WG2-only features. That and macros. :-) Don't forget there are worlds besides ASCII and Unicode. We Japanese have been using mutibyte code over 30 years. I'm afraid that limiting WG1 to ASCII cuts off significant portion of audiences. WG1 doesn't need to *mandate* unicode. But the slight consideration to the possible encodings beyond ASCII, which means just not mixiing bytes and characters, allows the code to be much more portable. I don't think that's too much to ask. --shiro _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
