l...@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes: > David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> skribis: > >> Shouldn't strings be in "internal encoding" anyway? The whole point of >> a string is to be an array of characters. Not an array of arbitrarily >> encoded bytes. > > Yes, but I was referring to “string ports”, which may actually be fed > arbitrary binary data, not just characters.
For the record, I agree with David. String ports should be textual ports, not binary ports. In particular, you should be able to write/read _any_ character to/from a string port, regardless of what the current default port encoding happens to be. SRFI-6 (string ports) says nothing about port encodings, and yet portable code written for SRFI-6 will fail on Guile 2.0 unless the string is constrained to whatever the default port encoding happens to be. This is not just a theoretical issue; it has caused trouble in practice, e.g.: http://bugs.gnu.org/11197 Unfortunately, we are now in an awkward situation. The current behavior of Guile 2.0 is conceptually broken and breaks portable SRFI-6 code, and yet it is possible that some users have grown to depend on our current behavior. Mark
