At Sun, 28 Dec 2003 14:24:09 -0500, Paul Schlie wrote:
>
> (display (string "list: " ls #\newline) to-what-ever-port-you-like)

1) Does string use display or write to convert objects?  You often need
   to interleave both.

2) This can be inefficient to the point of being unusable.  If ls takes
   up more than 50% of your memory, you can't even build the
   intermediate string.

> (Personally I see no reason not to consider advocating simply backward
>  compatibly extending (string ...) rather than advocating "standardization"
>  of a function with limited additional utility which is arguably
>  inconsistent with the language's philosophy; but that of course is the
>  benefit that the SRFI process/forum provides us all.)

I wasn't suggesting this for backwards compatibility so much as forwards
compatibility.  There is currently some uncertainty in the Scheme
community as to exactly what a character is.  For porting Unicode-aware
Gauche scripts to other Schemes I've been toying with the idea of
unifying characters and numbers.  For future Schemes I wonder if
implementing characters as single-character symbols might not be a good
idea (probably still implemented using tagging under the hood rather
than bloat the symbol table).

Also I think it's good to keep string in the same style as list and
vector - it should build a sequence from the individual elements, and
not extrapolate them.

--
Alex