"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: And what does that buy me? Are we running in circles here? This is true without UCS-4 too. It's only the implementation that changes. Lisp code that relies on a particular representation of characters is broken in the first place. They don't excite me at all. 700M buffers excite me. Whose 700M buffer is this? Zed's. Who's Zed? Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead... How else would you do it? Bignums are not just another opaque data type -- they have to be done right. Unless, of course, you are satisfied with half-assed solutions a la Python or, for that matter, C. Don't you get it? It breaks any hope of large buffers working with bignums. Integers get propagated all over the place. If you take the easy way out and throw type errors in XINT, you could as well not bother in the first place. That's why I never tried to add them. --without-bignums never wins. Either do it right or don't do it at all. We aren't developing crappy commercial software here, after all. :-)