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From: Tom Lord <lord@xxxxxxx> Subject: Re: character strings versus byte strings Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 14:59:57 -0800 (PST) > ultimately Scheme's CHAR? and STRING? types are doomed and that we're > going to have to leave them underspecified and eventually unimportant > (in favor of a new TEXT? type). Eventually, I agree. > Here here, cheers, and happy holidays. Now, to what extent to we want > the SRFI-50 process to become that battleground vs. to what extent do > we want it to step lightly around the issue :-) I don't think we can settle down Scheme character problem here. From the common FFI perspective, however, there's a fact that we already have bunch of external C libraries that expects utf-8 string, and we want to call them. So I think its reasonable to have scheme-string-with-opaque-internal-rep <=> Utf8CString specified. Also from the FFI perspective, a scheme character may not be important after all. We could have FFI that deals only with utf-8 strings, and keep Scheme character issues inside Scheme world. --shiro