No, a record is a tagged (sequence of) value(s). <tag v1 v2 v3> If you put a single dictionary-valued "field" in a record, you get a variation with named fi

No, a record is a tagged (sequence of) value(s). <tag v1 v2 v3> If you put a single dictionary-valued "field" in a record, you get a variation with named fields <tag { field1: value1 field2: value2 field3: value3 }> Records have positional "fields" because of the Scheme heritage of the design. -- Re bytestring -- yes there are some concessions to real machines/languages in there that aren't absolutely required. Other examples include booleans and strings, which could have been <true> and <false> and <string [65 66 67]> etc respectively. There's a little more on this topic in footnote 2 on the "conventions" page: https://preserves.dev/conventions.html#fn:why-dictionaries https://preserves.dev/conventions.html#fn:why-dictionaries