Re: strings rationale

[Neil Jerram]

>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

    Tom> But the idea of a read-only-string is safe, reasonable,
    Tom> useful, and otherwise good.

But from the programmer's POV it is an inconvenience.

It is better and more useful to provide a unified string data type and
automatically infer mutability etc. from the way that such strings are
used, so long as this can be achieved safely (i.e. functionally
correct wrt multithreading) and reasonably (i.e. acceptable
performance).

This is what we hope for Guile, and is what lies behind the comment
about read-only strings disappearing.

        Neil