Subclassing hierarchy of Strings and Arrays

This seems to me like one of the things Mark referred to the other day as something he might do differently if he ever makes another language. I see what you mean and there is probably a good case for it, although I don't consider myself a low-level programmer so I'm probably not the ideal person to judge. I certainly have come across a couple of the issues you suggest this would fix, and you're right, it would fix them. I think it's probably too far down the line for Mark to retro-fit all this back into Max. I don't know, I could be wrong, but I suspect it would be a pretty ugly job to try to build this hierarchy back into Max now. You say that it need not break any of our code with a strict-like construct, but that still leaves all the modules which have to work regardless of strict, superstrict and whatnot.