Re: [Scheme-reports] Comments on draft 7

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@x>]

On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 3:08 AM, Alan Watson <alan@x> wrote:

It's difficult to understand this prohibition. C strings containing non-terminal NUL characters are not prohibited:

  char s[] = "abc\0efg";

Sure, most C library functions will interpret this string as equivalent to the C string "abc" and most C-to-Scheme FFIs would convert this to the Scheme string "abc", but such ambiguities are not per se issues for Scheme code.

I think the existence of #\null at all is a wart, and

a throw-back to languages like C which require it.

In fact, the existence of all ASCII control characters

is a wart, a throw-back to languages with no separation

between binary and text.  I'd really like a language

where strings really are just text, and characters represent

letters and punctuation from written scripts.  In practice

ASCII is convenient, and almost all implementations will

support it (including #\null), but to forbid any attempts at

something cleaner is sad.

-- 

Alex

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