[Pika-dev] Re: tla1.2 on cygwin

[Matthew Dempsky]

Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

> In other news -- I really shudder to think what happens when case
> insensitive file systems meet Unicode.  Suddenly you're talking about
> embedding a fairly complex case canonicalization algorithm based on
> relatively huge data tables in every kernel and application that might
> ever need to compare a filename.  And the end result is going to be
> either locale dependent (uh... yeah, right) or linguistically
> imperfect

Isn't this an issue you're sort of tackling with srfi-52?

Maybe it's a little different because the majority of the
case-insensitivity identifiers can be handled just internally
(variable references and stuff can be optimized to just frame
references, etc.), but if you're promoting Scheme as a system language
then it seems like somewhere it would have to be exposed.

I could believe the argument might be related to file systems being a
(usually) kernel-space issue while even systems programming with
Scheme is still user-space (unless we bring back Lisp machines), but
if microkernels were more popular then the file systems could be just
user-space programs.

Personally, I don't have a very strong opinion either way, but I'm
curious of your (apparently inconsistant) thoughts.

-jivera