Hi! Kristian Lein-Mathisen suggested an extension to the bytevector syntax for SRFI-4 and R7RS bytevectors (which becomes more relevant in the forthcoming UTF-aware CHICKEN) which seems quite practical. I'd be eager to know how useful other users consider this feature before I submit a patch.
Basically, it just means to allow strings and character literals as elements of byte vectors written as "#u8(...)". Strings would then designate UTF-8 byte sequences, with characters being the same (equivalent to a 1-length string), so you could write: #u8(0x7f "EL" #\F ...) being the same as: #u8(0x7f 0x45 0x4c 0x46 ...) This is incompatible to SRFI-4 but similar to SRFI-207. #u8("foo") would effectively be identical to the SRFI-207 notation #u8"foo". Seems quite orthogonal to me. Any thoughts? felix