Subject: bug#25397: guile-2.2 regression in utf8 support in scm_puts scm_lfwrite scm_c_put_string

From: Andy Wingo <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2017 16:45:26 +0100

On Tue 10 Jan 2017 04:34, Linas Vepstas <[email-masked]> writes:

> void *wrap_puts(void* p)
> {
>    char *wtf = p;
>
>    SCM port = scm_current_output_port ();
>
>    scm_puts("the port-encoding is=", port);
>    scm_puts(scm_to_utf8_string(scm_port_encoding(port)), port);
>
>    scm_puts("\nThe string to display is =", port);
>    scm_puts (wtf, port);
>
>    scm_puts("\nWas expecting to see this=", port);
>    SCM str = scm_from_utf8_string(wtf);
>    scm_display(str, port);
>    scm_puts("\n\n", port);
>
>    return NULL;
> }

So, there are a few questions here.  scm_puts and scm_lfwrite are not
documented, so we need to do basic science on them to see what they are
supposed to do.

Firstly, is scm_puts() a textual interface or a binary interface?
I.e. does it write a sequence of characters or a sequence of bytes?

If I look at uses of scm_puts in Guile sources, it seems clear that it's
a textual interface.  That is to say, at all points, the intention seems
to be to write characters on a Guile port.  All of the uses are of
strings.  Please do a "git grep" on your source to see if your
perceptions correspond.

Now the question is, what encoding is the argument in?  If the port is
UTF-16, that byte string should be decoded to characters, and that
character sequence encoded to UTF-16.

All of the scm_puts calls in Guile are of one-byte characters with
codepoints less than 128, so when doing some port refactoring I chose to
interpret the argument as latin1.

FTR, in Guile 2.0, this was effectively a binary interface.  Guile 2.0's
scm_lfwrite interpreted the incoming bytes as ISO-8859-1 codepoints for
the purposes of updating line and column, but scm_puts and scm_lfwrite
just wrote out the bytes to the port directly, regardless of the
encoding.  That was the wrong thing.

Are you arguing that the byte string given to scm_puts should be decoded
from UTF-8?  That would be OK.

Andy