Re: strings draft

[Alex Shinn <foof@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At Thu, 22 Jan 2004 19:02:33 -0800 (PST), Tom Lord wrote:
> 
> You have a choice.
> 
> 1) Standard Scheme becomes case-sensitive.  May as well drop the case
>    mappings from the standard entirely, in this case.
> 
> 2) Standard Scheme specifies a deterministic case mapping for the
>    portable character set in which portable programs may be written.
>
> 3) Standard Scheme does not provide for portable Scheme source texts.
> 
> I pick (2) because, after all, it would be naive to think that the
> standard procedures for casemapping are linguistically sensitive in
> the first place.   My second choice would be (1) but it would be a
> sufficiently incompatible change that I don't take it seriously.   (3)
> -- which seems to be what you are advocating -- is something I
> consider completely unacceptable:

As do I, I certainly was not advocating (3).  It was a side-comment to
Thomas Bushnell's statement that case-mapping procedures take a 2nd
locale parameter, saying the parameter could be made optional in the
same way that (current-input-port) and (current-output-port) are
optional in the standard I/O procedures.  It's a convenience
issue... people write the standard I/O procedures enough that this seems
a useful feature, people don't use eval enough for R5RS to have defined
a (current-environment) (which opens a new can of worms anyway).

I'm not arguing either way as to using a default (current-locale), I'm
just pointing it out as a likely possibility (with semi-standard support
as it in effect already exists in SRFI-29).

Both of my suggestions on c.l.s. (of which I prefer the former) fall
under (2).

-- 
Alex