[gambit-list] planning Gambit 5

Jeff Read bitwize at gmail.com
Wed Nov 20 11:21:32 EST 2019


If Gambit 5 has full support for bytevector I/O primitives (which, being
R7RS-compatible, presumably it does), then I would totally get behind UTF-8
as the default charset. I wince a little every time I'm forced to use
'read-char' or similar to ingest bytes, anyway.

On Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 8:55 AM Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> With all the changes to Gambit recently it is time to think about Gambit
> v5.0.0 which will probably be released in the next 6-12 months and include
> some backward incompatible changes due to the evolution of the linking
> model for the new module system.
>
> Another backward incompatible change would be switching to multithreaded
> VMs by default, and the SMP scheduler.  But this will require community
> involvement to weed out the issues and make sure it is rock solid.
>
> One backward incompatible change that could also happen at that point is a
> change of the default character encoding to UTF-8 (currently Gambit
> defaults to ISO-8859-1, aka latin-1, for all I/O unless configured
> otherwise with --enable-default-runtime-options=...).  The nice thing about
> the ISO-8859-1 encoding is the 1-to-1 mapping between characters and bytes,
> so a program can do character I/O to read/write binary files, which was the
> only way to do binary I/O in the old days of Scheme (so some programs might
> depend on that).  Nowadays many environments support UTF-8 well.
>
> Please share your thoughts...
>
> Marc
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gambit-list mailing list
> Gambit-list at iro.umontreal.ca
> https://mailman.iro.umontreal.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.iro.umontreal.ca/pipermail/gambit-list/attachments/20191120/ed4f6362/attachment.htm>


More information about the Gambit-list mailing list