Re: strings rationale

[Alex Shinn]

>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

    Tom> I don't understand your explanation.

    Tom> Can symbols be used as strings?  Can there be substrings of
    Tom> symbols?

    Tom> If there are those things, what is "inconvenient" about
    Tom> providing a predicate that checks whether or not a particular
    Tom> string is a symbol or substring of a symbol?  If there aren't
    Tom> those things, how was eliminating them an improvement?

The inconvenience is in the need to use those predicates.  If strings
can be shared, you need to check for this before modifying them.

    Tom> Eliminating some calls to "symbol->string" is both convenient
    Tom> and efficient.  That's one of the effects of having read-only
    Tom> strings.

Yes, and read-only-string? is both inconvenient and inefficient.
Unless there's evidence to suggest large gains from read-only strings
(taking into account the average extra checks required when working
with them), then a simpler, uniform string representation seems better
(In My Humble Never-Written-My-Own-Scheme-Implementation Opinion).

-- 
Alex Shinn <address@hidden>