The attached patch attempts to add the ability for ABCL to interpret the form #\unnnn as referring to the unicode character at the hexadecimal codepoint nnnn. I'd commit it to trunk for wider experimentation but ran into an erroneous interaction with Babel's own version of a sharp backslash reader in trying to run the CFFI tests, indicating that I probably missed something rather fundamental here. -- "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare to it now."