I still don't like the current practice of allowing START and END
parameters to almost every procedures, since this encourage a bad
programming style. If you need the performance of shared substrings,
you should use a Scheme implementation which have that, or write
your programs in C instead, IMHO.

However, I have a compromise idea. Instead of the optional START and
END parameters, allow using a list '(s start end) instead of the string
parameter. In this case, I think that procedures returning an index
should return an index to the substring, not to the whole string. Then
you can store and use a substrings easily. Then we can also get rid of
the "low-level" argument parsing stuff.

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