Thomas Bushnell BSG <xxxxxx@becket.net> writes:

> We *do* have something we can call characters: characters.
> You might find them useless, but their semantics are quite clear.

It's not clear at all. Please explain what do you mean by characters.

> Storage is irrelevant.  An implementation would be free to store
> characters however it wished.  char->integer and char<? can return
> whatever the implementation pleases.  I would rather drop them, since
> they have nothing really to do with characters.

Then it's impossible to implement a UTF-8 encoder. There is an
infinite number of potential characters, and there is no way to
examine what a given character means.

Similarly it's impossible to implement a UTF-8 decoder. There is
no way to construct characters from code points.

Now, if you come with a set of routines for manipulating the code
point structure of a character, I don't believe that the terminology:
calling it a character instead of a string, and calling the elements
code points instead of characters, is so essential to break
established practice of using code points or even lower level code
units as Scheme characters.

--
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       xxxxxx@knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/