Re: Wide strings

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi!

Mike Gran <spk121@yahoo.com> writes:

> Gnulib works for me.  Bruno is the maintainer of those funcs, so I'm
> sure they work great.

Good!

> So really the first questions to answer are the encoding question and
> whether the R6RS string API is the goal.  

SRFI-1[34] (i.e., status quo in terms of supported APIs) seems like a
reasonable milestone.

> For the former, I rather like the idea that internally a string will
> internally be encoded either as 4-byte chars of UTF-32 or 1-byte chars
> of ISO-8859-1.  Since the first 256 chars of UTF-32 are ISO-8859-1, it
> makes it trivial for string-ref/set to work with codepoints.

Good to know.  That would give us O(1) ref/set!, and with Latin-1
special-cased, we'd have memory saving when interpreting Latin-1 code,
which is good.

> (Though, such a scheme would force scm_take_locale_string to become
> scm_take_iso88591_string.)

I think it would not *become* scm_take_iso88591_string, but
scm_take_iso88591_string (and others, as Andy suggested) would
*complement* it.

Thanks,
Ludo'.