I am posting this as an individual member of the Scheme
community. I am not speaking for the R6RS editors, and
this message should not be confused with the editors'
eventual formal response.
Mike Sperber quoting John Cowan:
> > D) It's not obvious why one must invoke a procedure to fetch the
> > standard codecs, since what is returned is immutable. Why not just bind
> > the names directly to the codec objects?
>
> That issue came up in the discussion among the editors.
Having thought about it a bit more since then, there are
better reasons for using procedures than were given in the
editors' discussion.
One is that a procedure can load code and data on demand,
which might be desirable if an implementation were to
provide codecs for a large proportion of the 250 or so
character sets listed at the IANA Charset Registry
(
http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets ).
Will
Received on Sat Nov 18 2006 - 11:05:07 UTC