>From: Tom Lord <xxxxxx@emf.net>
Subject: Re: character strings versus byte strings
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 14:59:57 -0800 (PST)

> ultimately Scheme's CHAR? and STRING? types are doomed and that we're
> going to have to leave them underspecified and eventually unimportant
> (in favor of a new TEXT? type).

Eventually, I agree.

> Here here, cheers, and happy holidays.  Now, to what extent to we want
> the SRFI-50 process to become that battleground vs. to what extent do
> we want it to step lightly around the issue :-)

I don't think we can settle down Scheme character problem here.

>From the common FFI perspective, however, there's a fact that we
already have bunch of external C libraries that expects utf-8 string,
and we want to call them.  So I think its reasonable to have
scheme-string-with-opaque-internal-rep <=> Utf8CString specified.

Also from the FFI perspective, a scheme character may not be important
after all.   We could have FFI that deals only with utf-8 strings,
and keep Scheme character issues inside Scheme world.

--shiro