Re: [Scheme-reports] Issues from read-through

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 6:09 AM, Chris Hanson <cph@x> wrote:

>> Section 6.7:
>>
>> This would have been a good opportunity to provide for immutable
>> strings, and push the mutability procedures into an optional
>> library. The mutable-string design, which is my fault given that
>> I defined the string operations in RRRS, is in hindsight a real
>> mistake. There's no good reason for strings to be mutable, and
>> requiring them to be precludes many useful implementations, e.g.
>> a simple UTF-8 encoded bytevector.
>
>
> I agree, but with backwards compatibility restrictions the
> best we could do was move the operations to a library, so
> strings themselves would still be mutable. Something for
> R8RS.

Well, if the library is optional, and the implementation doesn't
provide that library, strings _are_ immutable in that implementation.
That would be a useful change.

I very much wanted to optimize the libraries to balance

convenience versus the core size. I especially didn't want

to make the user suffer because we thought something

might go in some direction in the future.

In retrospect it may have been worth it in this case though.

Alex