[r6rs-discuss] [ANN] scheme-reports.org

[Thomas Lord]

On Tue, 2009-08-25 at 11:51 -0700, Per Bothner wrote:
> A mutable string or character sequence can be useful, but only
> if supports insert and delete - at the very least append.

I think that is not *quite* true as stated but it
clearly points to a truth.

A mutable character sequence that supports insert and
delete is certainly useful in more situations than
a mutable character sequence that supports only 
replacement.

If you wanted to tell me that small Scheme should
support insert/delete on strings I don't, off the top
of my head, have any objections.   On the other hand,
I don't feel like making that argument myself because
of vague concern for the implied burden on implementations.


> A mutable fixed-size string has so few uses (I can't think of
> any) that there is little point is providing it in a language.
> The only use I can think of is to implement a variable-size
> string!  If there are any real use cases, they can use a vector.

I offered two examples of use cases which I think point
to a broad range of situations where fixed-length mutable
strings are quite useful.   I'm not sure why you are overlooking
that.

-t