On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 6:47 PM, John Cowan <xxxxxx@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> - In the Copying and conversion section, the first two procedures take a
> parameter *span*, but the description uses *string*, which is consistent
> with the rest of the document.

Yes, that's because I copied them from Draft #1 after the global
replacement of "span" with "string". Fixed.

Make sure you grab my fix, too. (<span> had been replaced with <string> in one paragraph, but I fixed that before publishing the new draft.)

> (Why have two names for equivalent procedures, by the way? That will
> be confusing.)

R7RS-small has both. I think of `substring`, which is the only name in
R5RS, as primarily for backward compatibility. On the other hand, there
is no contrast between -copy and -copy! here, as there is in R7RS-small
and SRFI-13.

(In SRFI 13, string-copy makes a real copy, whereas substring may make
a shared substring, but this distinction matters only in Guile.)

That makes sense.