Hi! I've developed the following patch, which fixes R5RS-compatibility for printing symbols starting/ending with ':'. The problem with the current behaviour is that you end-up with files that can not be read from other Schemes when you write out such symbols: guile> (write ':foo) (newline) #{:foo}# guile> My patch changes this behaviour to what you'd expect: guile> (write ':foo) (newline) :foo guile> However, when the keywords reader option is set, the old behaviour is re-established, to allow writing out these symbols in "escaped form" so that they can be read back when the prefix keywords reader option is turned on.