Re: [Chicken-users] Egg for converting character sets with iconv

[felix]

Joerg F. Wittenberger wrote:
> Felix Winkelmann <address@hidden> writes:
>
>
> > > Are  there  plans to  support  multibyte  characters directly  in
> > > Chicken?  This  ought to be  done very carefully: i'd  rather not
> > > have them supported at all (ie. through my egg) than through some
> > > poorly designed interface.
> >
> > No, currently there are no such plans. I'm not a big fan of unicode,
> > to be honest. But what I could live with would be an external library
> > (similar to Bigloo's ucs2 module).
>
>
> I'm just about to come back to "re-"port Askemos to chicken.  This
> will require me to implement something.  For Rscheme I decided to go
> with UTF-8 (after reading about the gauche experience) and that seems
> to be the right choice to me as well.  The actual code doesn't really
> interfere with plain ASCII strings as basic Scheme string type.  All
> I'll need from chicken is yet another data type, which has a "length"
> field, size field and a byte string.  Felix, this would be easy,
> wouln't it?  Should we try to add multi byte support to chicken that
> way?

You mean a separate disjoint datatype? No problem. But how transparent
should string operations be? Would a separate set of operations
(utf8-string-ref, ... - the actual names are not important right now)
be acceptable?


cheers,
felix