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Re: Fundamental operations on strings

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 75 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 75 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.




On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Shiro Kawai wrote:

>The current draft says:

>   Like in R5RS, a Scheme string is a fixed-length
>   array of Scheme characters.

> What R5RS says is "Strings are sequences of
> characters."  Although having make-string,
> string-ref and string-set! as primitives suggests
> R5RS authors had an array model in their mind, a
> string can be implemented differently.  If strings
> are meant to manipulate texts, as stated in this
> srfi, such alternative implementation can even be
> better than the simple "fixed-length mutable array
> of characters" view.

I strongly agree.  Using Unicode makes length-changing
mutations even more likely than before, and frequently
forces it in unexpected situations where the end-user
won't understand or expect it; implementors need to be
free to implement strings in a way that makes
length-changing mutations efficient.  Don't stick them
to a fixed-length mutable array.

In particular, don't spec something that outlaws "ropes";
they are much closer to being "the right thing."

			Bear