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bear wrote:
Actually, I think that specifying string behavior in a document about arrays is a mistake. The operations we want to do on strings are in many cases fundamentally different from the operations that are efficient to do on arrays.
I agree with you, but I think we're stuck with the fact that a Scheme "string" is a low-level indexable modifiable fixed-length array of
characters. Now this is a totally useless data type [*], except that it's close to the hardware (unless you're using Unicode) so it *might* be useful for implementing a more useful data type .... in which case it should be hidden in the implementation. Still, it's what we have. Now if you'd design and implement a more useful higher-level data type,d \ then maybe we can deprecate low-level strings.able ut fixeb[*] Modifiable but fixed-length makes no sense - except it's easy to implement. Indexing of strings is also a semantically bogus
concept. To clarify: a position in a string, in the emacs "mark" sense, does make sense - but the value of a position as an integer isn't meaningful. -- --Per Bothner per@xxxxxxxxxxx http://per.bothner.com/