Eliot,

> (Alternatives that are indexed by integers might also work well, e.g. a flat WeakValueDictionary that used a WeakArray
> for its values).

  Yes, there would be no reason to do basicNew.

  But I need to ask the same question Colin asked; what would we gain?
For most of the time, characters are in strings so there are not many
real instances around.  For writing a parser (hmm) it might make
things a bit faster, but not much.

  Tagged immediate character objects would have been ok (like
VisualWorks), but it puts some pressure on integers...

-- Yoshiki