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From: Michael Sperber <sperber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: Strings/chars Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 11:56:07 +0100 > What's your take on combining characters? I don't have clear idea at the application level, and can only imagine that we need several layers. As Tom Lord mentioned, eventually we'd have such layers, and R5RS character would fade away in long long term. Bear's appoach (as far as I understand, each "character" consists of base character + zero or more combining characters; correct me if I'm wrong) looks suitable for most linguistic text processing. An application may need more data per character, such as how it is represented in the original data, or which language it belongs to---it's application dependent, so if we ever want to expose it to C FFI, a "character" wouldn't just map to an integer; instead, it would be an opaque object with full of APIs to extract various information. So far I haven't reached that stage; I'm still dealing with the layer that tweaks codepoints, and programs I'm writing haven't require more than that so far (fortunately). My next step will be to build a layer similar to Bear's on top of the codepoint API. --shiro