() Andy Wingo <wi...@pobox.com> () Sat, 09 Jun 2012 13:07:15 +0200 Again, the gain in expressiveness is probably worth it
Overall, i am concerned about quick fixes and slow suffering in the Guile design. To break it down from different angles: Thinking positively: If you want to make a case for such a facility, why not show some code, both without (status quo) and with (proposed)? It should be clear what expressiveness is gained, and how. Thinking negatively: Guile 1.4.x has ‘make-shared-substring’, which is similar in spirit (since strings of that era are basically byte vectors), but i believe later Guile versions dropped that. It might be instructive to (reconstruct if necessary and) follow that chain of reasoning to avoid repeating a similar flip-flop. Thinking abstractly: IIRC, SRFI 13 suggests that its support for substrings would not be necessary if programmers wrote code using "range" style. Could the client code you have in mind be rephrased like that?
