Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH][for chicken-5] Remove srfi-13

[Felix Winkelmann]

> They'll still have to be ported one-by-one, as probably every egg will
> break.

I still think moving the eggs en-masse gives us a better overview,
otherwise we will just forget some eggs. And we can always delete eggs
for which *everybody* agrees that they should go.

> As you know, one of the problems with SRFI-13 is that it's extremely
> inefficient.  It would make sense if user code can also rely on faster
> alternatives.  One of the rules of CHICKEN optimization has long been
> to avoid SRFI-13 if you can.

That should be the job of replacement eggs, not by providing core
stuff. It doesn't make sense to strip out the srfi's and then add them
again, even when using different names.

> 
>> Otherwise people will start mixing official and
>> internal SRFI procedures. Isn't one of the goals of CHICKEN-5 to make
>> the API cleaner?
> 
> I don't see how providing faster alternatives to SRFI-13 procedures is
> mutually exclusive with making a cleaner API, unless you're planning on
> making completely unsafe versions.

Yes (gulp!), I was also thinking about unsafe versions. But I think it
is more important to reduce the core API and reduce the number of
alternatives, which reduces the mental load on the programmer ("should
I use 'string-prefix?' or 'string-starts-with?', and so on...)


felix