[r6rs-discuss] Unicode issues

[William D Clinger]

Jason Orendorff wrote:
> The page you linked earlier proposes 7 different string
> representations. They have radically different best-case,
> expected-case, and worst-case performance. End users are left with no
> idea what to expect. R6RS strings are a grimacing caricature of an
> abstraction.

That's true only if you consider utf8 and utf16
to be viable representations for Scheme strings.
I don't.  The five viable representations have
extremely similar best-case, expected-case, and
worst-case performance with respect to amortized
time, and their space efficiency is always the
same to within a factor of 4.

A survey of existing implementations would find
much larger variations (in both space and time)
for Scheme's most important data type: procedures.

Will