Re: [Chicken-users] UTF-8 support in eggs

[Michele La Monaca]

On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 7:00 AM, Alex Shinn <address@hidden> wrote:

> However, I don't think that's the real problem.  The issue as I
> understand is that although Chicken has both strings and
> bytevectors in the core, historically and for continued simplicity
> strings are abused as bytevectors in many cases.  This allows
> you to use the plentiful string libraries (e.g. srfi-13 and regex)
> on binary data, whereas there are few bytevector utils.

...

> So as you see the change is contagious.  We can update the core
> efficiently and easily, but then we have to fix the string abusers,
> and then we have to replace existing index-oriented APIs.

Hi Alex,

I am not an expert here, so take it easy.  You seem to suggest this
kind of approach:

1) move abusers to bytevectors (bytevector API needing a major boost for that)
2) update string functions to support utf-8 but afterwards move to new
cursor-oriented functions

Wouldn't be simpler and more effective this other path?

1) keep current string functions as they are (i.e. byte-oriented) and
keep "abusers" abusing (and happy)
2) provide new utf8/cursor-oriented functions where needed (e.g.
utf8-string-ref but not utf8-string-append)

Regards,
Michele