Hello, Ken. I'm wondering whether you'd like to comment on Per's comment below about SRFI 48, in particular about the definition of freshline. Since the SRFI was long ago finalized, it's too late to change the meaning. However, if you'd like to add an editorial note in the Status section making a recommendation, I would be happy to add it.

Thank you very much.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Per Bothner <xxxxxx@bothner.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 4:36 PM
Subject: questionable definition of "freshline" in srfi-48
To: <xxxxxx@srfi.schemers.org>

I just implemented (import (srfi 48)) for Kawa (partly to try out the srfi-64 re-implementation).

In srfi-48 the ~& Freshline escape is defined as:

"output a newline character if it is known that the previous output was not a newline"

I think this is backwards. Common Lisp has:

Unless it can be determined that the output stream is already at the beginning of a line, this outputs a newline.

I that is more useful. It is what Kawa implements - even if you (import (srfi 48)):
I'm not planning on changing Kawa's srfi-48 support to be compatible with what I
think is a broken definition.

Note there are two problems:
(1) If the previous character is unknown, Common Lisp (and Kawa)
writes a newline, while the SRFI 48 specification would not.
(2) If known to be at the beginning of output, Common Lisp (and Kawa) would
not write a newline, while the SRFI 48 specification would.

This is probably not a pure editorial fix. The specification includes an example, which I think
is wrong in that it writes a newline at the start of the output.
--
--Per Bothner
xxxxxx@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/