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Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

Andrew Dalke adalke at mindspring.com
Thu Oct 9 14:45:47 EDT 2003 
james anderson:
> i realize that this thread is hopelessly amorphous, but this post did
> introduce some concrete issues which bear concrete responses...

Thank you for the commentary.

> i got only as far as the realization that, in order to be of any use,
unicode
> data management has to support the eventual primitive string operations.
which
> introduces the problem that, in many cases, these primitive operations
> eventually devolve to the respective os api. which, if one compares apple
and
> unix apis are anything but uniform. it is simply not possible to provide
them
> with the same data and do anything worthwhile. if it is possible to give
some
> concrete pointers to how other languages provide for this i would be
grateful.

Python does it by ignoring the respective os APIs, if I understand
your meaning and Python's implementation correctly.  Here's some
more information about Unicode in Python

http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0100.html
http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0261.html
http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0277.html

http://www.python.org/doc/current/ref/strings.html

http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-unicodedata.html
http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-codecs.html


> and i have no idea what people do with surrogate pairs.

See PEP 261 listed above for commentary, and you may want
to email the author of that PEP, Paul Prescod.  I am definitely
not the one to ask.

> yes, there are several available common-lisp implementations for http
clients
> and servers. they offer significant trade-offs in api complexity,
> functionality, resource requirements and performance.

And there are several available Python implementations for the same;
Twisted's being the most notable.  But the two main distributions (and
variants like Stackless) include a common API for it, which makes
it easy to start, and for most cases is sufficient.

I fully understand that it isn't part of the standard, but it would be
useful if there was a consensus that "packages X, Y, and Z will
always be included in our distributions."

> if one needs to _port_ it to a new lisp, yes. perhaps you skipped over the
> list of lisps to which it has been ported. if you look at the #+/-
> conditionalization, you may observe that the differences are not
significant.

You are correct, and I did skip that list.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com
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