"features"?  It's basically ASCII, as such useful beyond Scheme because
it's sufficient to process most text written in English, which is fine by
me; but arguably insufficient otherwise.

There's a distinct advantage to keeping the character set in which the
language is specified in (and is capable of processing itself), distinct
from the character set it can utilize to process arbitrary language text,
as otherwise it becomes too easy to then rationalize utilizing characters
specified within the broader character set within program code, which would
then truly needlessly limit the code's portability, from both a machine as
well as human perspective. (As I don't believe it's productive to anyone to
attempt to interpret code utilizing symbols written/spelled in arbitrary
languages and corresponding character sets; but is clearly useful to enable
portable programs to be written to process such arbitrary text).

-paul-

> From: xxxxxx@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
>> Paul Schlie <xxxxxx@comcast.net> writes:
>> Or one could more simply reinforce the notion scheme's character type is
>> simply distinct from (although likely a subset of) the definition of a
>> new character type targeted to support more generalized text processing
>> than is minimally necessary to support the definition and processing of
>> the scheme language itself (which is all that scheme's character type is
>> specified/suited to be sufficient for).
>
> The Scheme character type includes many features designed to make it
> more "useful", which are completely unnecessary for the simple task of
> parsing Scheme.  This creates the problem that people may *use* it for
> tasks other than just parsing Scheme (as indeed they do), and thus
> programs which use it for those tasks will be ill suited to richer
> environments.
>
> Thomas