Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <xxxxxx@knm.org.pl> writes:

>> 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.

What exactly makes it impossible?  There are an infinity of possible
integers, and this hasn't hampered the implementation of <.

> 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.

There is no "established practice" of doing this.  The established
practice is to pretend that code points and abstract characters are
the same.

Thomas