What's been going on here? Are there smoke-filled back-room
negotiations that we're not seeing, or is the document languishing in
the sloughs of mid-term despondency?

SRFI-13 is rapidly approaching it's 6-month birthday. There have been
a lot of good ideas, but I think that SRFI-13 is catching a bad case
of featuritis. There seem to be two main open issues (shared
substrings and unicode/internationalized tex), each of which is
big enough for it's own SRFI, IMO.

Olin, can we quickly reduce this SRFI to a minimal subset? I don't
think anyone wants it to be withdrawn, but at the rate we're going
it should be. The SRFI process document claims 90 days as the max
discussion period, the rationale, IIRC, being that if you can't settle
it in 90 days, the idea is not mature enough. I don't think that the
ideas here are anything like immature. Just the opposite, in fact,
hence the multiplicity of ideas.

Perhaps renaming it to 'Octet-string Library' and removing all NL
sensitive issues (yes that means losing the STRING-CI* functions, but
we've already got them in R5RS) might help clarify the implementation
goals.

If you need help with the reference implementation, I volunteer. I'd
really like to see this SRFI finalized.

david rush
--
I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat myself when under
stress. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat myself when
under stress. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat myself
when under stress. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat