I guess if you have an array of characters and you want to insert into the middle, you could promote the array into a rope as follows: 1. break the array int

I guess if you have an array of characters and you want to insert into the middle, you could promote the array into a rope as follows: 1. break the array into two extents (start address / length pairs) 2. make a rope out of those two extents 3. do the insert on the resulting rope this assumes that you're okay with starting with an array of characters and ending up with a rope. ISTR this pattern was common-ish in erlang last time I looked at erlang, but they call ropes (of bytes) "iolists", and support for iolists goes all the way down into the standard library.