This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 56 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 56 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
A number of Schemes (Scheme48 and Chicken, at least) support byte-vectors for doing aggregate binary io. This seems to satisfy most needs for doing something beyond simple scalar io, while still allowing the application to perform whatever interpretation is necessary. I suppose some might consider it onerous to require implementing such a data type for this SRFI, but I consider byte-vectors extraordinarily useful. Dale Jordan