[R6RS] Unicode SRFI - responses needed

[William D Clinger]

> * Alex Shinn and others have convinced me that the SRFI should include
>   string-upcase', `string-downcase', and `string-titlecase', which are
>   locale-independent but use the mappings in "SpecialCasing.txt" to
>   handle a few conversions that are not 1-to-1 in scalar values.

Sounds good to me.  Those aren't in the R5RS, and they'll
probably behave the same on ISO 8859-n as any existing
extensions.

>   An ongoing point of discussion among a handful of people (not
>   including me) is whether R6RS should include any character
>   comparison or conversion operations. I still think it should, but we
>   should discuss this specifically before putting out a new draft.

I think we should, but I haven't read the SRFI-75 discussion
yet.


> * The reception for here strings is mixed. I would be happy to see
>   them go, at this point, just to keep things simpler. In any case,
>   I'd like to get a sense of the editors' opinion before producing a
>   second draft.

I think we should leave "here strings" out of the R6RS, but
submit a SRFI on "here strings" shortly after the R6RS comes
out.

> * An open question: are Scheme implementation required to support all
>   Unicode scalar values, or are subsets ok?

I think it's simpler to require all Unicode scalar values.

As for the analogy with numbers, my response is that being
so free with numbers led to portability problems that we
are hoping to fix in the R6RS.  The sooner such problems
are fixed, the less painful the fix.

On the other hand, we're talking about putting numbers
other than fixnums and flonums into R6RS libraries, and
providing portable modules that implement those libraries.
We might try something similar with regard to characters
and strings.

Will