Re: Unicode ports patch

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Mike Gran <spk121@yahoo.com> writes:

> The latest commit 'Add full Unicode capability to ports and the default
> reader' 889975e51accb80491af76fc5db980aeb3edd342 adds the majority of
> the functionality for non-ASCII strings.  

This patch adds a few functions related to string ports:

  * libguile/strports.c: store string ports in locale encoding
    (scm_strport_to_locale_u8vector, scm_call_with_output_locale_u8vector)
    (scm_open_input_locale_u8vector, scm_get_output_locale_u8vector):
    new functions

I think it would be nicer if these used bytevectors instead of u8vectors
and were locale-independent (which would match the `string->utf8' &
co. API).  Also I would make `scm_strport_to_locale_u8vector ()'
private.  And finally, it'd be even better if it were documented in the
manual.  :-)

Actually I'm not convinced that `call-with-output-locale-*' and
`open-input-locale-*' are useful, precisely because we can use a string
port to get a string and then `string->utf8' to get at the string bits.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Ludo'.