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Alex Shinn <alexshinn@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > On 8/20/05, Michael Sperber <sperber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> You have seen that SRFI 68 addresses all of these issues, right? > > Yes, SRFI-68 can easily handle all of these issues, simply using > READ/WRITE-U8 for READ/WRITE-BYTE. This is because SRFI-68 makes no > distinction between binary and character ports. If we're willing to > drop that distinction, then the whole problem disappears, but we've > abandoned implementations that don't let you directly mix binary and > text operations (notably all Java implementations, and C implementations > using wchar). I don't quite understand what you mean here---it's true that you probably can't use the underlying abstractions for text I/O, but you certainly can perform text I/O using the facilities in SRFI 68, building on the underlying binary I/O. Trying to build a multi-encoding text I/O system that's magically compatibly with what the common platforms have (i.e. the common implementations of wchar, .NET, Java etc.), and still functionally desirable is hard, and I have trouble seeing the benefits. > Another way of looking at it is that SRFI-68 is flexible enough to allow > us to create new port types with an explicit binary vs character > distinction. That distinction is really anathema to its design approach---see the Design Rationale section. > If we were to do that, then what API should we use when we > inevitably need to serialize/deserialize Scheme string objects > to/from binary ports? A SRFI-68 approach might be to combine > READ-BLOB-N with a utility procedure > > (BLOB->STRING str [encoding]) > > probably implemented on top of blob-input-stream and transcoder. > This generalizes into the first category of solutions, using specific > procedures to read and write text to binary ports. I don't understand what this would buy---could you elaborate? -- Cheers =8-} Mike Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla