Jim Blandy <xxxxxx@redhat.com> writes:

> Implementing this behavior can't be a burden on the Scheme
> implementation, since it had to get all the data from the outside
> system anyway, and it was almost certainly already in the program's C
> execution character set when it arrived.

This is not true.  A scheme system might perfectly reasonably directly
read files in whatever encoding, and handle network streams in
whatever encoding, without ever thinking of them as C characters in
between thinking of them as octets and thinking of them as Scheme
characters.

Thomas