[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] Scheme should not be changed to be case sensitive.

From: Matthew Flatt <mflatt>
Date: Tue Nov 14 22:15:50 2006

At Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:39:02 -0800, Thomas Lord wrote:
> R^_RS is getting this all wrong by trying to, arrogantly, carve
> out some entirely *novel* definition of CHAR?. Oh, you
> can't pass a surrogate codepoint integer value to INTEGER->CHAR
> etc. This committee -- this Scheme committee -- has decided
> that it knows better than the Unicode consortium or anyone else
> how to define the basis sets of text processing: I have no respect
> for that.

I think you're mistaken about the consortium's recommendation. Section
5.1 of Unicode version 4.1 suggests UTF-32 code units (i.e., Unicode
scalar values) as a definition of the "character" datatype. The other
two suggestions in that section are UTF-16 code units (as in Java) and
UTF-8 code units. The section is labeled "ANSI/ISO C wchar_t", but I
find no other recommendation in the standard about how to implement a
"character" datatype. In particular, I find no recommendation to use
code points as characters.

Matthew
Received on Tue Nov 14 2006 - 22:14:53 UTC