SRFI 140: Immutable Strings

by Per Bothner

status: final (2017-05-24)

keywords: Data Structure, Text

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Abstract

This attempts to solve the same issues with R7RS strings raised by SRFI-135, but with better integration with the Scheme language.

We propose to retain the name string as the type of sequences of Unicode characters (scalar values). There are two standard subtypes of string:

• Immutable strings, also called istrings, cannot be modified after they have been created. Calling string-set! on an istring throws an error. On the other hand, the core operations string-ref and string-length are guaranteed to be O(1).
• Mutable strings can be modified in-place using string-set! and other operations. However, string-ref, string-set!, or string-length have no performance guarantees. On many implementation they may take time proportional to the length of the string.

An implementation may support other kinds of strings. For example on the Java platform it may be reasonable to consider any instance of java.lang.CharSequence to be a string.

The main part of the proposal specifies the default bindings of various procedure names, as might be pre-defined in a REPL. Specifically, some procedures that traditionally return mutable strings are changed to return istrings. We later discuss compatibility and other library issues.

This combines SRFI-13, SRFI-135, and SRFI-118.