guilev1/2 musing

[Thomas Morley]

Hi David,

this refers to
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2019-01/msg00169.html
but I thought to better open a new thread for this topic.

All thoughts are from a LilyPond guile-users point of view...

You wrote:
"Guile-2.0 fully supports Unicode. Which is sort of the problem."

If I understand correctly this can be made "visible" with:

(length (char-set->list char-set:full))

guilev1: -> 256
guilev2: -> 1112064

Furthermore you wrote
"Guile-1 only supports byte strings/streams and we are
responsible for all the rest.  Which means that no conversions happen in
the API, and any conversions happen under own control.  For native
string processing in Scheme, that is sort of a nuisance.  But a fraction
of the nuisance that the "full Unicode support" of Guile-2 is."

To illustrate, an example:

(string-length "ä")

guilev1: -> 2
guilev2: -> 1

Because of this, string-processing in guilev1 is a _mega_ nuisance, imho.
And I really love guilev2 for (string-length "ä") -> 1
Though, it comes at a cost ...


In other posts you wrote about the possibility we could fork guilev1.
Do you see any way to implement full Unicode support in such a fork of
our own and in a saner way than current guilev2?

>From my point of view (and limited knowledge) other newly implemented
guilev2-procedures are not _that_ important.



Cheers,
  Harm