btw, why is there no peekb? Or any other functions that work on bytes?
As part of the design process of finding the shortest Arc implementation, pg is careful not to include functions that he isn't actually using for news. This leads to some surprises (car, cdr, cadr, cddr, but no cdar?) but also removes cruft that builds up implementing things that people might need some day but turn out not to.
It turns out not to be a problem, since Arc is so concise it's really easy to extend, and so people quickly implement the things they need that pg happens not to be using for news.
I find I prefer the Arc approach, since libraries that try to provide everything I might need often have so much stuff that ironically they make it harder to implement what I actually need.
