[bdc@zurich.ai.mit.edu: Re: string srfi]

[shivers at cc dot gatech dot edu]

C'mon, guys, be serious. I'd put that on my "clean this up when we've
absolutely run out of useful things to do or someone in a position of
authority complains seriously about it " list...

If you really, really want to waste time on this, I just went & checked. The
four remaining functions that came from MIT Scheme are
    %STRING-{PREFIX,SUFFIX}-LENGTH{,-CI}. 

If you decide to get a friend to describe the API and rewrite them clean-room,
and you mail me source-code and make it either public domain or BSD, I will
gratefully receive them, make my own pass over them, and stick the results
into the reference lib, cite you as a contributing hero, and rip out the MIT
copyright.

But you must write these things *tight*. They are the inner loop of
all string comparisons; they were microcoded on the early MIT Schemes.
Tight iterations, fast-path cases for EQ? strings, do it right.
   -Olin

    From: Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>
    To: "Nic Ferrier" <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk>
    Cc: kawa@sourceware.cygnus.com
    Subject: Re: string srfi
    Date: 26 Feb 2001 19:19:26 -0800

    "Nic Ferrier" <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk> writes:

    > Is there any interest from anybody in seeing a Kawa implementation of
    > the string srfi? (by olin shivers).

    It would probably be desirable.  I am concerned about the license of
    the reference implementation.  I don't think clause 2 or 3 of the
    MIT Scheme license (which covers part of the code) are compatible
    with the GPL, so cannot be distributed with Kawa.  However, a good
    part of the implementation, including the KMP string-search code
    (I guess the hardest part of the code) is covered by the scsh
    license, which I don't see any problems with.  Hopefully, Olin
    will be willing clarify which parts of the code are contaminated
    by the MIT Scheme license, so those can be re-implemented.