Tom Emerson wrote:
> Representing strings internally in UTF-8 is a loss though, since you
> lose random access to the string.

Random access to a previously accessed position works just fine - just
use the byte offset.

Random accesses to a position in a string that has not been previously
accessed is not in itself useful.

> For some applications this isn't a big deal, but in general using UTF-8
 > as an internal representation is a bad idea.

It's the other way round.  Using UTF-8 as in internal representation is
just fine for *applications*.  The problem is that certain *API*s have a
concept of indexing into a string, and unfortunately R5RS is one of
them.  In itself indexing of strings is a useless feature, as it can be
replaced by a sequential-access cursor/iterator API - but historically
the Scheme cursor/iterator API uses integers for the "cursor".  And
existing code moves the "cursor" forwards by adding 1.
--
	--Per Bothner
xxxxxx@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/