the open call, would work just fine, but which might
not represent a string in the particular encoding the program expects.
While in principle it may be desirable to provide a mechanism for
accessing environment variables raw, this SRFI specifies a "string"
return type because that best represents the consensus of existing
implementations, and captures the semantically desirable behavior in
the common case that the byte sequence is interpretable as a string.</p>

<a name="0.1_appendix"></a>
<h1>Appendix: Ex