Re: [Scheme-reports] fresh empty strings

[John Cowan <cowan@x>]

Ray Dillinger scripsit:

> It's not clear to me that, in a unicode universe, there's a useful
> distinction between characters and strings of length 1.  At the very
> least, character operations such as case and other such mappings
> are not closed on the set of single codepoints, which makes
> treating "character" separately from "string" semantically
> dubious.

I agree wholeheartedly.  Unfortunately, characters and mutable strings are
IEEE Scheme features, so the bar for removing them is very high.  Both
R6RS and R7RS make character and string casing operations inconsistent:
\#ß upcases to itself, whereas "ß" upcases to "SS".  (There is a capital
sharp S in Unicode, but it is normally used only in display text such
as headlines; it downcases to the ordinary sharp S but not vice versa,
so in this respect Unicode is intentionally self-inconsistent.)

-- 
John Cowan <cowan@x>             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
The peculiar excellence of comedy is its excellent fooling, and Aristophanes's
claim to immortality is based upon one title only: he was a master maker
of comedy, he could fool excellently.  Here Gilbert stands side by side
with him.  He, too, could write the most admirable nonsense.  There has
never been better fooling than his, and a comparison with him carries
nothing derogatory to the great Athenian. --Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way

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