Re: [Chicken-hackers] CHICKEN in production

[Jörg F. Wittenberger]

Am 14.10.2014 um 04:25 schrieb John Cowan:
> Florian Zumbiehl scripsit:
>
> > String containing slash to filename? Exception! String containing colon
> > to hostname? Exception! String containing NUL to C string? Exception!
> These aren't all the same.  Filenames and hostnames are specific uses of
> strings, but C strings are just as general purpose as anyone else's strings,
> even though they can't handle NUL.

IMHO they are all the same too.  At least from a practitioners point of 
few.  I doubt all to many of those even knew that the Scheme standard 
would be vague on allowing NUL as part of a string or not. Let alone 
recalling this in practice.  And I don't know how many Scheme 
implementations did reject such strings.  I know however that there is 
so much code out there, which expects NUL as legitimate character in 
Scheme strings, that I'd recommend to not reject it by default for a 
long time to come.

This time may be used to gather some experience from multiple parties.

I submit that I'm personally even opposed to the original idea of adding 
the additional NUL.  Not only FORTH; with RScheme we had show stopper 
type of problems when we tried to get rid of the additional NUL once we 
had a case requiring the removal.  Furthermore my applications rarely 
pass a string to C where the trailing NUL is required.  But we handle a 
huge amount of short strings.  Therefore I expect the added overhead to 
degrade the total quality of chicken for me.

/Jerry