Well, you need it for cons and the generator lazy-gen and other functions that don't take a stream. Maybe the others don't, but it seemed to me that sometimes it makes sense to return a list and sometimes not. So especially since functions like firstn do something useful without changing anything, maybe we should keep that behavior around. But it's just an idea. What do you think? Since you're using them for project Euler, it'll be good to hear your experiences.