‘scm_from_locale_string’ and locale character encoding

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> skribis:

> On Wed 13 Jul 2011 17:11, Bruce Korb <bkorb@gnu.org> writes:

[...]

>> New name, please.
>
> We'll try harder in the future.  But we cannot change the fact that
> scm_from_locale_string does decode its argument.

FWIW, I do understand the inconvenience and frustration reported here.

But as Andy suggests, I think it should come as no surprise that
‘scm_from_locale_string’ returns a string from a locale-encoded one.
Guile 1.8 already documented things this way [0].

As for (ab)using strings as byte sequences, it was bound to break with
the introduction of Unicode support.  To transition away from that, 1.8
had SRFI-4 and related I/O support (‘uniform-vector-read!’, etc.),
though it wasn’t as convenient as R6RS bytevectors.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

[0] http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/docs-1.8/guile-ref/Conversion-to_002ffrom-C.html#index-scm_005ffrom_005flocale_005fstring-846