I've traced something that is not entirely a bug, but which was a little surprise for me. It has to do with the extensions that guile provides to the Scheme language -- namely, uniform vectors and arrays.

The (ice-9 match) module offers the syntax

(match #(1 2 3)

  (#(a b c)

   (list a b c)))

;===> (1 2 3)

However, none of the following behaves as one could expect:

(match #u8(1 2 3)

  (#u8(a b c)

   (list a b c)))

(match #2((1 2)(3 4))

  (#2((a b)(c d))

   (list a b c d)))

(match #u8(1 2 3); this is perhaps questionable, but

  (#(a b c) ; i add it for a discussion

  (list a b c))) 

After looking into the source of the pattern matcher, I've found out that the problem is probably situated deeper: while it is possible to define macros with regular vectors, like that:

(define-syntax nv

  (syntax-rules ()

    ((nv #(v ...))

     (list v ...))))

it doesn't work if we replace the #(v ...) with #u8(v ...), for instance.

Best regards,

M.