random beginner questions

[ham@polya.stanford.edu]

I'm posting questions rather than "discussion". If there
is a better mailing list for questions, let me know and
I will send to there.

1) How do a read a byte, not really a character because I need to 
get all eight bits, from a file?

   Likewise, how do I write a byte (all eight bits) to a file?

2) There's a procedure, "bref", to reference bytes in a byte vector.

How do a set a byte in a byte vector?

3)Right now, I'm trying to avoid "load-foreign" since I am using the
mips version of t which hasn't implemented it yet, but
how does one pass a list of strings to a c function where the c function
accepts an array of pointers to strings.

I'm trying to experiment with T to the point to see if I can do my systems
work in it comfortably.  My test case is to write an object file linker
in T, but all of these low level interface things are giving me problems.

Peter