On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Andy Wingo <wi...@pobox.com> wrote:
> Quiz: what does this do? > > (define (f s) > (with-output-to-string (lambda () (display s)))) > > When called with a string, what should it do? Like (f "foo"). > > If you answered, "return the string", that's what I would think it > should do. > > But no, currently the answer is locale-specific. It encodes the string > according to the current locale, then decodes it from that encoding. If > your locale can't encode the string, tough luck for you! > > This is a bit crazy. Surely the port should be textual? Surely the > default encoding for a string port should be utf-8 or something that can > actually handle all strings? > Yes, the POSIX locale should refer to the external environment - notably the terminal, command-line args and env variables. Default file encodings are open to interpretation, but either using POSIX or ignoring it completely and using heuristics combined with overrides (e.g. -*- coding: ... -*-) are both reasonable. But string ports are entirely internal - there's no reason to use the locale for them. -- Alex
