Re: restricting functions to only accept string parameters

[Jim Blandy]

> IMHO, since the standard allows mixed-case symbols to be eq, it doesn't
> really make sense to allow symbols for filenames and regular expressions
> and so on.

There's some interesting history there.  At one point, Guile was
case-sensitive, even though R4RS and R5RS say Scheme shouldn't be,
because SCSH is case-sensitive so as to make certain shell-related
constructs more convenient, and Guile wanted to be very close to SCSH.

There were some similar oddities present to support Emacs Lisp.

Since then, we've pretty much decided that there are other ways to
support SCSH and Emacs Lisp than changing Guile Scheme to be the
common subset of those languages.  :) So these motivations aren't
relevant any more.