Re: subbytevectors

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Andy Wingo <address@hidden>
() Sat, 09 Jun 2012 13:07:15 +0200

   Again, the gain in expressiveness is probably worth it

Overall, i am concerned about quick fixes and slow suffering
in the Guile design.  To break it down from different angles:

Thinking positively:

If you want to make a case for such a facility, why not
show some code, both without (status quo) and with (proposed)?
It should be clear what expressiveness is gained, and how.

Thinking negatively: 

Guile 1.4.x has ‘make-shared-substring’, which is similar in
spirit (since strings of that era are basically byte vectors),
but i believe later Guile versions dropped that.  It might be
instructive to (reconstruct if necessary and) follow that chain
of reasoning to avoid repeating a similar flip-flop.

Thinking abstractly:

IIRC, SRFI 13 suggests that its support for substrings would
not be necessary if programmers wrote code using "range" style.
Could the client code you have in mind be rephrased like that?