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Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote: > I can't tell what you're arguing for.
We *do* have something we can call characters: characters. You might find them useless, but their semantics are quite clear.
Maybe in your universe.
Are you arguing which of the following: 1) We should have neither code points nor characters; 2) We should have code points and not characters, and call code points something like "code-points";3) We should have code points and not characters, and call code points something like "characters";4) We should have both code points and characters, call code points something like "characters" and call characters something else. If you are arguing (1), then fine, let's drop both. If you are arguing (3) and (4), there is no defense for your position.
That's very arrogant. I'm arguing for (3). Most other programming languages have chosen this solution, because it works. I don't know of any that have implemented "character" (in your sense) as a primitive data type, so it is up to you to explain how to do it.
What does char->integer return? How does char<? work? What is your proposed implementation for a "character" in the Unicode world, given that it is not a code-point? How would you store characters in a string?Storage is irrelevant. An implementation would be free to store characters however it wished. char->integer and char<? can return whatever the implementation pleases. I would rather drop them, since they have nothing really to do with characters. They are functions on *code points*, which are there because the R5RS authors did not bother to distinguish code points from characters.
I'm asking how *you* would implement a "character" data type. Assume you have 32-bit "scheme values". Would you make characters immediate/unboxed values? In that case, assume you have 28 bits. Or are characters pointers to objects in memory? If so, how are they managed? Are equal characters eq? Suppose I have a UTF-8 input file. What does read-char do? What is a string - an array of 32-bit Scheme values or could it be more compact? -- --Per Bothner per@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/