Re: The “binary-friendly” Latin-1

[Mike Gran <spk121@yahoo.com>]

> From:Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org>
> To:guile-devel@gnu.org
> Cc:
> Sent:Monday, January 24, 2011 2:26 PM
> Subject:The “binary-friendly” Latin-1
> 
> Hello!
> 
> Do we really want to keep:
> 
>   1. The notion of a “binary-friendly” ISO-8859-1 encoding?  It’s
>     actually mostly gone with the iconv change, since every textual
>     access goes through iconv.  For binary accesses, the right API is
>     (rnrs io ports) or similar.

An equivalent question is if you care about backward compatibility of
legacy ports.  Legacy ports returned strings and were once the only option.
I think it is a bad idea if you are replacing one non-RNRS port system
with another non-RNRS port system.  It is a less bad if you are replacing
non-RNRS ports with RNRS ports, assuming, of course that R7RS doesn't just
invent yet another port system.

> 
>   2. The #f <=> "ISO-8859-1" equivalence for ‘port-encoding’ and
>     ‘set-port-encoding!’.  Likewise, commit
>     d9544bf012b6e343c80b76bd5761b1583cc106a3 makes ‘port-encoding’
>     always return a string and pt->encoding always be non-NULL.

Is the cost of doing the various string comparisons of port-encoding
strings negligible?  It was put in as a (premature) optimization.

> 
> Sorry for questioning this now, but these are important questions, I
> think.

Indeed.

> 
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.

Thanks,

Mike