Re: Overuse of strings Lauri Alanko (24 Jan 2006 17:59 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Per Bothner (24 Jan 2006 19:51 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Alan Bawden (25 Jan 2006 00:44 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Alex Shinn (25 Jan 2006 01:39 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Per Bothner (25 Jan 2006 02:04 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Alan Bawden (25 Jan 2006 02:50 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Lauri Alanko (25 Jan 2006 18:19 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Neil Van Dyke (25 Jan 2006 19:07 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings bear (25 Jan 2006 22:40 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Lauri Alanko (26 Jan 2006 07:35 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Alex Shinn (26 Jan 2006 01:37 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Neil Van Dyke (26 Jan 2006 02:03 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Anton van Straaten (26 Jan 2006 10:09 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Lauri Alanko (26 Jan 2006 10:25 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Alex Shinn (26 Jan 2006 02:17 UTC)
Re: Overuse of strings Ray Blaak (26 Jan 2006 06:56 UTC)

Re: Overuse of strings Alan Bawden 25 Jan 2006 00:44 UTC

   Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:51:34 -0800
   From: Per Bothner <xxxxxx@bothner.com>
   Cc: srfi-83@srfi.schemers.org

   Lauri Alanko wrote:
   > So I suggest
   >
   > "hello"         -> hello
   > "scheme://r6rs" -> (scheme r6rs)
   >
   > Only users of lesser programming languages are forced to stick with
   > strings to represent identifiers and structured data.

   No, "lesser languages" (which of course also support structured data,
   if not as conveniently as Lisp/Scheme) use strings because they are
   convenient and standrd.

   The advantage of using URIs strings is that they are standard,
   universal, and familiar.

Which moves me to wonder if the Scheme Editors are planning on registering
the "scheme:" scheme with the IETF and IANA?

URI systax is an incredibly ugly thing, as anyone who has ever written a
URI parser can tell you -- but there may well be some advantage in using URIs
if there is some way to leverage all the existing URI/URL/URN
infrastructure.  I.e., if something really useful happens if someone uses
"ftp://..." in a Scheme module.

If it is the case that there is this advantage, then the Scheme Editors
need to register "scheme:" as an official URI scheme, otherwise we won't
-really- be using URIs -- there will always be the danger that someone else
could register "scheme:" with some -other- stntax and meaning, and then we
wouldn't be able to use that new kind of URI in our Scheme modules...

   > We have symbols and s-exps. Let's use them.

   Why?  Saying something is "un-schemish" is not a reason.
   What would using symbols and s-exp gain?  What kind of
   operations would it make easier?

Almost any operation on a URI requires a URI parser.  Of course any
S-expression representation also requires a parser -- but typically a much
simpler one written in terms of `car', `cdr' and `eg?'.

- Alan