Re: Unicode and Guile

[Marius Vollmer]

Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

>     ~ (grapheme=? g1 g2 [locale]) => <boolean>
>     ~ (grapheme<? g1 g2 [locale])
>     ~ (grapheme>? g1 g2 [locale])
>     [...]
>     ~ (grapheme-ci=? g1 g2 [locale])
>     ~ (grapheme-ci<? g1 g2 [locale])
>     ~ (grapheme-ci>? g1 g2 [locale])
>
>       The usual orderings.

Is it a good idea to have an ordering among graphemes, or would it be
better to only order texts, i.e., to allow for the context of a
grapheme to determine the order?

>     ~ (make-text-marker text index) => <marker>

What about having _only_ markers and not allow integers as indices?
Also, what about making TEXTs unmutable by default and instead let
TEXT-REPLACE, etc return a new text object?

>   The new TEXT? and GRAPHEME? types present a simple and traditional
>   interface to "conceptual strings" and "conceptual characters".  
>   They make it easy to express simple algorithms simply and without
>   reference to the internal structure of Unicode.

Indeed.

>   There is no essential difference between a grapheme and a text
>   object of length 1, and thus the proposal makes GRAPHEME? a 
>   subtype of TYPE.

Do we need the concept of grapheme at all, then?

> The proposal also makes it possible to pass strings everywhere that
> text can be used.   I think that's the more interesting direction: 
> just use text- and grapheme- procedures from now on except where you
> _really_ want to refer to octets.

Could we make strings/chars go away completely over time?  For vectors
of octets, there is u8vector? from SRFI-4.

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