Re: Using libunistring for string comparisons et al

[Mark H Weaver]

Noah Lavine <address@hidden> writes:
> I think there are two questions being conflated here: what Guile's
> internal string representation should be, and what convenience
> functions should be provided for users to easily make symbols.

Yes, you are absolutely right.  They are two separate questions.  They
were clearly separated in my mind, but I should have made that more
clear in my writing.

> So I think the thing to do here is make a list of what string formats
> you think people should easily be able to use, and then make
> convenience functions for each of them. Clearly ASCII is one. Perhaps
> UTF-8 is another.

We could do that, but there are a lot of these functions.  Making too
many different variants would significantly increase the number of
functions in our API.  I could perhaps be convinced that this is
worthwhile, but at present it seems to me that UTF-8 should be enough,
since ASCII strings are unchanged in UTF-8.

The only advantage I see to having ASCII variants is that they could be
implemented more efficiently, but the added speed compared to UTF-8
would almost certainly be lost in the noise unless the names were
absurdly long.

    Best,
     Mark