[r6rs-discuss] Unicode issues

[John Cowan]

William D Clinger scripsit:

> Implementations of the R6RS may use variable-width
> representations while achieving O(1) amortized time for
> string-length, string-ref, and string-set!.

Indeed.  What's more, there are four classes of programs:

a) those which need O(1) read/write access to characters in strings;

b) those which need O(1) read (but not write) access;

c) those which need amortized O(1) access;

d) those which do not need O(1) access at all.

Alas, there is no knowing a priori which Scheme implementations will be
used to execute which applications, so it's hard to make the appropriate
tradeoffs in advance.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan
The penguin geeks is happy / As under the waves they lark
The closed-source geeks ain't happy / They sad cause they in the dark
But geeks in the dark is lucky / They in for a worser treat
One day when the Borg go belly-up / Guess who wind up on the street.