[Bus-scheme-discuss] Fwd: Character Literals

[Phil Hagelberg]

JD Huntington <jedediah at jdhuntington.com> writes:

>     I did a bit of looking into how character literals are handled in some  
>     other versions of scheme, and thought it might be useful for  
>     discussion. As of now, bus-scheme character literals are parsed into  
>     one-character strings. However, it appears this is not the case in at  
>     least one other scheme implementation. Here's a snippet from PLT:
>
>         (char? #\a)
>    
>     #t
>    
>         (char? "a")
>    
>     #f

Bugger it all. I just checked R5RS, and it says (under section 3.2,
Disjointness of Types) that "No object satisfies more than one of the
following predicates:

boolean?   
pair?
symbol?    
number?
char?      
string?
vector?    
port?
procedure?".

So the standard is quite clear; it's just a question of whether we want
to follow Scheme or Ruby here. I personally prefer Ruby 1.9's approach
(Ruby 1.8's being, of course, totally brain-dead). I think we can leave
it how it is unless there are objections.

-Phil