Noah Lavine <noah.b.lav...@gmail.com> 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
