[Snow-users-list] snowman-app port problems in Guile
Marc Feeley
feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Mon Apr 14 21:12:04 EDT 2008
On 14-Apr-08, at 11:36 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> (author: "Danny Dub\351 <Danny.Dube at ift.ulaval.ca>")
> (author: "Adrien Pi\303\251rard <pierarda at iro.umontreal.ca")
>
> It's these escape sequences that make Guile's reader unhappy.
>
> However, I don't understand where they come from. When I download the
> snowballs that contain these strings "by hand" from the Snow
> website, I
> can see that they do not contain the escape sequences, but rather a
> UTF-8 or Latin-1 representation of these author names. So I suppose
> the
> escape sequences get added somehow as the strings are sent over HTTP.
>
> Can someone shed some light on this?
The escapes are generated by the snowfort server. The server, a
Scheme program, serializes the list of packages using "write" and the
snowman client will deserialize it using "read". In this case the
server is running on Gambit and the client is running on Guile.
Gambit's syntax for strings is compatible with C and the \ooo octal
notation is how non-ASCII LATIN-1 characters are written. Although
this syntax is not universal among Scheme implementations, it is a
fairly common extension to the standard Scheme syntax (supported by
Bigloo, Chez, Gambit, Kawa, MzScheme, Scsh and probably others).
Unfortunately Guile does not implement this extension. Note that the
snowfort server could be run using some other Scheme system, but that
does not solve the problem because the issue is the incompatibility of
the server's write and the client's read. That's what standards are
meant to solve.
So what to do? There is no standard way in Scheme to write non-ASCII
characters (in fact one could say that no character can be portably
written since Scheme does not define the character set!). Specific
serializer/deserializer algorithms other than write/read could be
implemented but that would be a real pain and it would make I/O really
slow on interpreted systems.
The pragmatic solution is to avoid non-ASCII characters in Scheme
code, and Snow packages in particular.
Marc
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