Re: SRFI-14 and locale settings

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Neil Jerram <address@hidden> writes:

>> In practice, I can think of two ways to determine the set of _letters_
>> available in the current encoding (which is what `char-set:letter'
>> expects).
>>
>> 1. Since SRFI-14 lists all the characters that have to be added to the
>>    ASCII `char-set:letter' to get the Latin-1 `char-set:letter', we
>>    could somehow hard-code them.  But this is ugly.
>
> I don't see why you think it's ugly.  If it's the right solution, it's
> the right solution.

I'm not sure there's a "right solution".  I said I considered it ugly
because it would be Latin-1-specific and it may be incorrect for other
8-bit charsets.

>> As Kevin mentioned earlier, all the char sets could be re-computed in
>> `scm_setlocale ()'.
>
> This sounds even trickier, and wrong, given that the intention of SRFI
> 14 is for char-set:letter to be locale-independent.

The starting point of this thread was precisely that `char-set:letter'
must reflect the character set supported by Guile at the time it is
used.  As Kevin suggested [0], `setlocale' is currently the only way one
can change the charset supported by Guile, hence this suggestion.

Another option would be to add, say, a `--charset' command-line option
to Guile, or a `set-charset' call, something like that.  Would you
prefer something like this?

Thanks,
Ludovic.

[0] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2006-09/msg00006.html