At Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:00:51 -0500, Paul Schlie wrote: > Maybe I'm missing the boat, but from the best I can tell, all > discussions seem to be leading to the erroneous presumption that it's > adequate for scheme to restrict itself to exclusively processing data > originating, and destined as Unicode encoded text, which would be > most unfortunate. I don't think that this is the case. PLT Scheme, for instance (you may have seen Matthew's recent post on the plt-scheme mailing list), is going to have byte ports. If you do read-char on a byte port, the bytes coming out of the port will be interpreted as unicode (utf8 I believe, unless you specify otherwise) but you can also extract the bytes from the port directly. Robby