They have one or two uses for which they're indispensible, mostly to do with large volumes of fixed record length, usually binary data.

They have one or two uses for which they're indispensible, mostly to do with large volumes of fixed record length, usually binary data.

Thank you for the "caveat".

Indeed I was thinking of this kind of (what I'd call) "addomesticated" action at distance more in terms of a syntactically and semantically cool possibility to yield yet more WTDI: I was and I am intrigued by the concept and the idea; I was not talking of an actual "need".

All in all I realise that my own example may have conveyed the impression that my primary interest was focused on dealing with strings, but that is not the case. It's focused on the implications of (extending) the semantics of "lvalues as something into which you can inject something else to perform some kind of reasonably addomesticated action at distance". (At your own risk and peril, but if you're messing with this kinda stuff, then you're supposed to know what you're doing...)