[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] Bytes<->vector procedures

[AndrevanTonder]

On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, Abdulaziz Ghuloum wrote:

> Sorry, I don't get it.  What does efficiency of implementation have anything 
> to do with inclusion in R6RS?

To answer your question, I am not sure what efficiency has to do with inclusion. 
I did check that "efficient" and its derivatives occur in 15 places in the 
document.

I do think, though, that usefulness should play a role.  How often does one 
need to operate on lists of numbers, as opposed to vectors of numbers?  In my 
experience, not very often.  For this reason, I believe that bytes<->vector 
operations would be more useful than the current bytes<->list operations, and I 
am surprised that the latter was chosen over the former.

> I can implement these in many implementations 
> efficiently already.

The bytes->vector operations are essentially fancy memory copy operations, 
which can be microcoded if they are primitive.

Andre