Re: [Chicken-hackers] CHICKEN in production

[John Cowan]

Michele La Monaca scripsit:

> I must confess I didn't read the entire thread. But, what exactly buys
> us barring NUL in strings

Part of the design of Chicken is close integration with C.  The ability
to share strings with C rather than constantly copying them as they pass
from Scheme to C and back would be a great enhancement to integration,
as this copying can be very expensive in string-oriented programs that
need to use external C libraries for ease of development or efficiency.

> other than limiting the usefulness of the type and its powerful API
> (while breaking a lot of things along the way)? Also, NUL is a valid
> UTF-8 character.

Valid but useless.  It has no significance whatever.  The only reason
to allow NUL is in situations where strings are being used as
bytevectors, but we *have* both blobs and u8vectors.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        address@hidden
Said Agatha Christie / To E. Philips Oppenheim
"Who is this Hemingway? / Who is this Proust?
Who is this Vladimir / Whatchamacallum,
This neopostrealist / Rabble?" she groused.
        --George Starbuck, Pith and Vinegar