From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Mark H Weaver Newsgroups: gmane.lisp.guile.devel Subject: Re: Using libunistring for string comparisons et al Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:49:13 -0400 Message-ID: <87zkorglfq.fsf@netris.org> References: <336042.33326.qm@web37901.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <878vwgmhah.fsf@netris.org> <511668.33680.qm@web37902.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <87sjuokniq.fsf@netris.org> <118142.11911.qm@web37907.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <87ipvjlvgj.fsf@netris.org> <87lj0bi4qs.fsf@netris.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1300549794 10597 80.91.229.12 (19 Mar 2011 15:49:54 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2011 15:49:54 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Andy Wingo , Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?= , guile-devel@gnu.org To: Noah Lavine Original-X-From: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sat Mar 19 16:49:44 2011 Return-path: Envelope-to: guile-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Q0yPP-0001o9-49 for guile-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 19 Mar 2011 16:49:43 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:43536 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Q0yPO-0000c1-Lu for guile-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:49:42 -0400 Original-Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=46602 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Q0yPL-0000Xn-FS for guile-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:49:40 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Q0yPK-0006uO-Bx for guile-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:49:39 -0400 Original-Received: from world.peace.net ([96.39.62.75]:38435) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Q0yPJ-0006tW-3b; Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:49:37 -0400 Original-Received: from 209-6-93-251.c3-0.smr-ubr1.sbo-smr.ma.cable.rcn.com ([209.6.93.251] helo=freedomincluded) by world.peace.net with esmtpa (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Q0yPC-000448-On; Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:49:30 -0400 Original-Received: from mhw by freedomincluded with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Q0yP0-0004Ot-Tc; Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:49:18 -0400 In-Reply-To: (Noah Lavine's message of "Sat, 19 Mar 2011 10:53:50 -0400") User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.3 (gnu/linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.6 (newer, 3) X-Received-From: 96.39.62.75 X-BeenThere: guile-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Developers list for Guile, the GNU extensibility library" List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.lisp.guile.devel:11918 Archived-At: Noah Lavine writes: > I think there are two questions being conflated here: what Guile's > internal string representation should be, and what convenience > functions should be provided for users to easily make symbols. Yes, you are absolutely right. They are two separate questions. They were clearly separated in my mind, but I should have made that more clear in my writing. > So I think the thing to do here is make a list of what string formats > you think people should easily be able to use, and then make > convenience functions for each of them. Clearly ASCII is one. Perhaps > UTF-8 is another. We could do that, but there are a lot of these functions. Making too many different variants would significantly increase the number of functions in our API. I could perhaps be convinced that this is worthwhile, but at present it seems to me that UTF-8 should be enough, since ASCII strings are unchanged in UTF-8. The only advantage I see to having ASCII variants is that they could be implemented more efficiently, but the added speed compared to UTF-8 would almost certainly be lost in the noise unless the names were absurdly long. Best, Mark