UTF16 encoding adds BOM everywhere?

[Jean Abou Samra]

Hi,

With this code:

(let ((p (open-output-file "x.txt")))
  (set-port-encoding! p "UTF16")
  (display "ABC" p)
  (close-port p))

the sequence of bytes in the output file x.txt is

['FF', 'FE', '41', '0', 'FF', 'FE', '42', '0', 'FF', 'FE', '43', '0']

FFE is a little-endian Byte Order Mark (BOM), fine.
But why is Guile adding it before every character
instead of just at the beginning of the string?
Is that expected?

This is a curiosity question; since what I want is
big endian, I just used "UTF16BE", which outputs
big endian, and doesn't add the BOM -- I can then just
add a BOM manually. Still, I'm puzzled by this
behavior.

Thanks,
Jean