[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] Improve port i/o.

From: John Cowan <cowan>
Date: Tue Nov 14 16:56:03 2006

William D Clinger scripsit:

> The rest of this comment suggests a better design, and
> then describes some outstanding issues for which I have
> no strong recommendation at this time.

I very much like this design.

> [issue:BOM]
>
> While I'm all for encouraging programmers to use the
> Unicode character encodings that interpret byte order
> marks as specified by the Unicode standard, I worry
> about documents that implicitly use or explicitly
> specify UTF-16LE or UTF-32LE, which cannot be read
> using the UTF-16 or UTF-32 codecs. If few documents
> actually use UTF-16LE or UTF-32LE, then this is not
> much of a concern.

Few documents do. Typical use-cases for UTF-16{BE,LE} encoding
are things like fields in a database, where the overhead of a
BOM for every field is overwhelming.

> [issue:locale]
>
> Implementations of Scheme will be in a much better
> position than the R6RS to guess the transcoding that
> is appropriate for a text file, so the R6RS should
> not insist upon any particular transcoding when none
> is specified by the call to an open-X procedure.

I agree, but I also think it is good to have an explicit
way to get a representation of the local transcoding
which can be passed to open-X and means "use whatever
your default behavior is."

-- 
John Cowan  cowan_at_ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan
The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own
skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among
other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.  --Edsger Dijkstra
Received on Tue Nov 14 2006 - 16:55:52 UTC

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