 other types of homogeneous vectors in <a href="http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-4/">SRFI 4</a>, but these both only allow retrieving the binary data of one type.</p><p>This is awkward in many situations, because an application might access different kinds of entities from a single binary block.  Even for uniform blocks, the disjointness of the various vector data types in SRFI 4 means that, say, an I/O API needs to provide an army of procedures for each of them in order to provide efficient access to binary d