Hi, In a number of places in swank.lisp various strings are declared as SIMPLE-BASE-STRING. Is there a reason for this declaration -- in particular, is it expected that these strings will be specialized to hold only BASE-CHAR? Or are they in fact general strings? (at least the version in BRIEFLY-DESCRIBE-SYMBOL-FOR-EMACS leads me to suspect that they are fairly general strings). If I'm right, could the declaration be changed to reflect this, maybe to SIMPLE-STRING (or even STRING, if they're not in performance-critical areas)? It is likely that sbcl, in the near future, will have multiple string representations, where SIMPLE-BASE-STRING means (SIMPLE-ARRAY BASE-CHAR (*)), which will be distinct from (SIMPLE-ARRAY CHARACTER (*)) [ they're currently the same in all known implementations, I believe]. Cheers, Christophe -- http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~csr21/ +44 1223 510 299/+44 7729 383 757 (set-pprint-dispatch 'number (lambda (s o) (declare (special b)) (format s b))) (defvar b "~&Just another Lisp hacker~%") (pprint #36rJesusCollegeCambridge)