[R6RS] I/O design

Michael Sperber sperber at informatik.uni-tuebingen.de
Thu Dec 7 04:54:19 EST 2006


Will pointed out to me privately that I should have explicitly talked
about a use case Kent was describing during the phone conference.  I'm
sure I have been remiss---this wasn't intentional.  I'm not sure I
remember the details right:

Under my proposal, with the transcoders provided by default, as Will
has pointed out, binary data will generally get transcoded.  You won't
get the raw binary data out of a transcoded port.  A previous attempt
to explain this is here:

http://www.r6rs.org/r6rs-editors/2006-August/001672.html

(And there's more in that entire thread.)

As Will correctly points out, that means that arbitrary binary data
will get mangled by the transcoder.  However, this way of dealing with
transcoding is still useful for the following use cases, prohibited by
Will's proposal:

- getting ASCII or UTF-8 text via the textual I/O interface, when
  embedded into binary data
- defining other transcoders in the future that perform functions
  like compression, encryption, etc.
- composing transcoders to achieve the above

-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla



More information about the R6RS mailing list