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.
The proposed semantics for collation of strings (using string>? & friends) by pointwise comparison is in direct conflict with the unicode standard for locale-independent collation of strings, as expressed in http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/ The unicode collation algorithm abstracts over representation issues such as how characters are rendered as sequences of individual codepoints, making the test for canonical (glyph) equivalence rather than codepoint equivalence. It's hard to say what the right thing to do is. I think that hardly any programming language implementors will actually support the Unicode standard on this case, and I'm not sure they should; it devotes massive resources to compensating for the technical flaws in the rest of the Unicode standard. Certainly if you value performance (speed) of code you'll want to provide string comparison operators that don't go to this much trouble. Since I figure most language implementors will ignore it (and *are* ignoring it, in Java and C#) this part of the Unicode standard will probably eventually be abandoned. At the same time, I want to leave it legal for scheme implementors who are actually doing unicode support to conform to it if they want to. Bear