Re: [Chicken-users] ditching syntax-case modules for the utf8 egg

[felix winkelmann]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 5:22 PM, John Cowan <address@hidden> wrote:
> felix winkelmann scripsit:
>
>
>  > A real module system would solve all these problems cleanly.
>
>  It wouldn't solve the data-punning problem.  As long as the same object
>  can be seen one way by one module and another way by another, problems
>  will continue to be endemic.  To fix that, we need two run-time types,
>  which I hereby dub restricted and unrestricted strings.
>

The contents of a string a purely defined by the operations you perform
on them.

Let me add that I don't think this discussion leads anywhere. Unfortunately
every time the word "uincode" appears, everybody feels pressed to
discuss the different solutions at length (it's a particularly perverse
form of the bikeshed syndrome). I admit that finding the optimal way
of handling unciode is an unsolved and interesting problem, but it's
much easier to talk about it than to implement it. The core *must*
stay minimal (and it pains me to see the stuff that is regularly added
to the extras unit - yes, that's you, kon). This is both for performance
and portability reasons, and because it is simply the way it is currently
implemented. There is enough low-level support to handle unicode
in higher level layers (like the utf8 egg). Changing the string representation
is absolutely out of the question - too much depends on it, and, let's
be frank, nobody would be able to implement the required support, anyway.


cheers,
felix