Re: Internal visibility

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

"Han-Wen Nienhuys" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 3:10 PM, Neil Jerram <address@hidden> wrote:

>> Guile's string API is aiming not to be 8-bit-assuming, and I would
>> guess from the code above that the C++ string class is 8-bit-assuming.
>
> Sorry, I guess I don't understand. What _is_the assumption for
> representing strings in GUILE?

Strings in Guile will eventually be sequences of Unicode code points (as
opposed to "bytes"), which can be represented in a variety of different
ways (UTF-8, UCS-4, etc.).  How Guile represents strings and whether
this representation "changes dynamically" (as you suggested) should not
be exposed to the applications in order to leave as much freedom as
possible to Guile's implementation strategy.

Instead, applications should be written against an encoding-oblivious
API.  This is what core R5RS constructs and SRFI-1[34] provide at the
Scheme level.

Thanks,
Ludovic.