xxxxxx@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:

> Jim Blandy <xxxxxx@redhat.com> writes:
>
> > Implementing this behavior can't be a burden on the Scheme
> > implementation, since it had to get all the data from the outside
> > system anyway, and it was almost certainly already in the program's C
> > execution character set when it arrived.
>
> This is not true.  A scheme system might perfectly reasonably directly
> read files in whatever encoding, and handle network streams in
> whatever encoding, without ever thinking of them as C characters in
> between thinking of them as octets and thinking of them as Scheme
> characters.

Okay, "all the data" is overstating it.  What I was trying to say is
that almost every system will end up having facilities for converting
to and from the C execution character set anyway, independent of the
SRFI, so having the SRFI require it will rarely be an additional
burden.