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

On 1/5/09 7:16 PM, Grant Rettke wrote:
> 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.

I obviously can't speak for Matthew but my guess is that it is simply 
about doing the right (and beautiful - at least on the external API 
front ;-) thing.

PS. The division between byte- and normal strings and the fact that 
normal strings are the default is great and makes many programs support 
Unicode without the programmer having to take care of it. Compare this 
to Python's Unicode support which is considered very good as far as 
mainstream programming languages go.

PS.2. The same goes for Scribble, the module system, the create 
executable option and many others. Beautiful pieces of machinery which 
surprise me with their ingenuity every time I use them. (just compare 
the implementation of the verbatim mode in Scribble reader to the 
nightmare of forcing this functionality upon (La)TeX or the create 
executable option with py2exe)

Big thanks to Matthew and to the whole PLT Team! :)

-- 
regards,
Jakub Piotr Cłapa