[plt-scheme] kudos for PLT's character set support

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 7:00 AM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 6:55 AM, Neil Van Dyke <neil at neilvandyke.org> wrote:
>> Looking at the PLT documentation and C code, it's clear that someone spent a
>> lot of effort on doing character sets well.
> That would be Matthew.

After Neil posted that question on libiconv it got me wondering about
the kind of motivations that drive an implementer of any language to
care about, and, expend the effort to provide such good support.

Is it personal interest? Is it demand of the users? It is the desire
for "common sense" functionality. From what I have read some vocal
folks think that Scheme and different encodings (Unicode for one) go
together like oil and water, so PLT's support stands out.