karlheg(a)cathcart.sysc.pdx.edu (Karl M. Hegbloom) writes: Random access to internal text representation is O(n) due to Charcount<->Bufbyte conversions. Thus simple iteration through a string is in fact an O(n^2) operation[1]. Buffers have a small cache of calculated byte positions, but the caches are not very efficient, either. Also, Mule does wonders with its guessing and file coding code. Look at lread.c for an example of what streams can do to you. [1] This is in Lisp. In C, most code has been rewritten to use INC_CHARPTR and DEC_CHARTPR macros to avoid the slowdown. See the Mule coding guide in the Internals manual for more details.