On Sat, 16 Jul 2005, Matthew Flatt wrote:

> My impression of the editors: we're not going to standardize anything
> less than a specific set of characters. There is a consensus that the
> current weak standard causes too many portability problems, and that
> the solution is to pin down precisely the meaning of "character".

Hmmm.  If the goal is portability, I see your point.
But for most implementations Unicode is still pretty
experimental; I'd have preferred to relax rather than
tighten the standard, in order to allow experimentation,
(indeed, in order to allow unicode at all) and then
tighten it later.

Are you really going to be okay with banning scheme from
tiny environments?  One of the language's strengths has
always been that it is a lisp small and simple enough to
embed in a larger application or to run on small hardware.
Unicode and its gargantuan tables will change all that.

Hmmm, then again, folk are using text editors now that
occupy hundreds of megabytes; who'd have believed such
things would ever be made, just a few years ago?  Maybe
software bloat allows us to require Unicode, with its
tables and all, and remain svelte-looking by comparison
to the general trend.

				Bear