string port encodings

[Andy Wingo]

Quiz: what does this do?

  (define (f s)
    (with-output-to-string (lambda () (display s))))

When called with a string, what should it do?  Like (f "foo").

If you answered, "return the string", that's what I would think it
should do.

But no, currently the answer is locale-specific.  It encodes the string
according to the current locale, then decodes it from that encoding.  If
your locale can't encode the string, tough luck for you!

This is a bit crazy.  Surely the port should be textual?  Surely the
default encoding for a string port should be utf-8 or something that can
actually handle all strings?

Andy
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