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

[Tobia Conforto]

Graham Fawcett wrote:
> Here's another thought. It seems to me that if we were to represent  
> strings as composite values, e.g. a two-slot record whose first slot  
> is an encoding (the symbol 'utf8, or #f for 'byte' encoding), and  
> whose second slot contains the string data, then the various string  
> functions could dispatch on the type, and there would be no need to  
> monkey-patch core string functions to get the desired semantics.

This is more or less how other languages, such as Python, solved the  
issue.  Two kinds of strings, byte and unicode, and overloading a few  
string operations to have a slightly different meaning when called on  
either, computing byte length vs. character length.


Tobia