Re: [Chicken-hackers] CR #1142 and upcoming changes

[Alan Post]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 04:41:54PM +0000, Mario domenech Goulart wrote:
> Hi Felix and all,
> 
> On Mon, 18 Aug 2014 16:53:22 +0200 (CEST) Felix Winkelmann <address@hidden> 
> wrote:
> 
> > This is just a proposal. What do others think?
> 
> Thanks for your message.  This is all very exciting and I'm totally for
> shrinking the core.
> 
> Not related with removing units from the core, but since we are talking
> about CHICKEN 5, shouldn't we consider discussing some polemic topics
> like the support for Unicode and bignums in core?  Those are limitations
> that recently lead to some ugly hacks (some examples in [1]) and bugs
> (e.g., [2]).
> 
> [1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2014-07/msg00017.html
> 
> [2] http://bugs.call-cc.org/ticket/1139
> 

Yes please.  The current way we're doing this is needlessly complex.
I don't think I'll ever have as much fun writing parsers as I did
when I could use ASCII character tables, but the one remaining use
case I have for solving problems in ASCII is preventing a terminal
snow crash when dumping core--the program is already on it's way out
and can solve encoding problems mañana.

That use case hardly justifies the work it takes to get Chicken to
be a first class citizen.  I would generally vote we take the most
frequenly used eggs and integrate them in to core, but as I fully
appreciate the argument against doing so I sure would like to ask
instead for utf-8 and numbers.

Thank you,

-a
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