Hello Guilers! I think it'd be nice to merge what's in Guile-R6RS-Libs into `master'. There are a few issues that need to be sorted out, though.
The API is visible at http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guile/guile-r6rs-libs.html and the standard is at http://www.r6rs.org/final/html/r6rs-lib/r6rs-lib-Z-H-1.html#node_toc_start . 0. Incompleteness Guile-R6RS-Libs provides a small subset of what's in /R6RS Standard Libraries/. In particular: - The UTF routines in `(rnrs bytevector)' are available, but wide string support isn't (yet) available. I think that's not a big issue given that Mike is working on it. - The `(rnrs io ports)' provides only binary I/O routines. These routines do not use the right exception mechanism. For instance, `port-position' should raise an `&assertion' R6RS error condition, which isn't implemented. - Some of the I/O procedures take a TRANSCODER argument but ignore it. Although it's incomplete compared to the standard, I find it useful because the APIs provide functionality not otherwise available in Guile. 1. Module naming The 2 available modules are named `(rnrs ...)', as described in R6RS. However, R6RS specifies the version number `(6)' as part of the name as well, which we don't support. Modules could be called `(r6rs ...)', which would address the version number problem, or even `(ice-9 ...)', which would make it clear that the implementation is not R6RS-compliant but rather "inspired" by R6RS APIs. I'm not sure which one of these 3 options is the best one. This will probably depend on how Unicode support evolves. 2. C name space C function/macro/variable names are all prefixed with `scm_r6rs_'. Should it change to `scm_'? 3. Bytevectors as generalized vectors? We could easily make bytevectors accessible through the generalized vector API. Pros: good integration, intuitive, convenient. Cons: incentive to use a "standard" API in a non-standard way. The latter may not be a problem since SRFI-4 vectors already behave this way. 4. Bytevector read syntax ... needs to be implemented. Comments welcome. Thanks, Ludo'.
