This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 13 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 13 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
I agree with Tom on all counts except one: accepting symbols instead of strings is not portable because the symbol 'foo can be represented internally in two ways: "foo" and "FOO". In any case, extending the domain of arguments is a slippery slope: if constructing procedures accept chars, strings and symbols, than why not lists of chars, lists of strings, vectors of chars etc? This argument also applies to CHAR/CSET/PREDICATE convention: why stop there? Sergei