Re: #<byte>?

[Matthew Flatt <mflatt@cs.utah.edu>]

Quoting "John R. Hall":
> Question: why doesn't MzScheme have a byte type?

Good question. We have certainly considered this possibility.

> Programs generally seem to use chars (and char->integer) to deal with
> byte-oriented binary data, but this is not an ideal solution in a
> world of multi-byte character sets (such as UNICODE).

Agreed.

The reason we still haven't bothered to distinguish chars and bytes in
MzScheme is essentially the same reason that MzScheme doesn't support
Unicode: In its mission as an embeddable, extensible, C-friendly Scheme
implementation, defining "char" to be "ASCII char" has many practical
advantanges.

More to the point, we aren't currently in a position to port MrEd (the
one big extension of MzScheme that we maintain) to a Unicode world.

Matthew


P.S.: I'm not sure I would go so far as to distinguish bytes from exact
integers in [0,255], but it merits further thought.