Base64 is a text representation of a binary blob of data - it's just a protocol that happens to limit itself to a less-likely-to-be-mangled-by-bad-string-handli

Base64 is a text representation of a binary blob of data - it's just a protocol that happens to limit itself to a less-likely-to-be-mangled-by-bad-string-handling-code sequence of bytes. Regexes are a great example - they're text that is parsed into a parsing-engine that can be executed. The text part is just a human-interface protocol over many possible implementations, and importantly, it has a standard. Slightly-varying standards at times, but everything trends towards Perl's version, plus/minus some features. And yes - implementations can choose which variant(s) they support, because they control its interpretation. Programming languages don't have a choice about if "Z̴̛̺͉͙͚̰̔̏ͧͅ" is a character though, if they deal with human-language input and output. Humans have already decided. When it's displayed, it either is or is not, often based on the viewer's language (e.g. `str.lower()` is locale-sensitive, but many programming languages ignore this and only deal with ASCII for English speakers). If the program doesn't understand how it's dealing with this human <-> computer protocol and mangles it, it's just as bad as something that mangles other protocols like TCP/IP, except that humans are occasionally more forgiving. --- edit: I should probably tl;dr this. There is a right way and a wrong way to manipulate human-language text. And it's extremely complicated to do correctly - people are difficult. Shoving it under the rug and ignoring it entirely, as has been done by most people in most languages, is 100% the wrong "solution". Python 3 (or even better, Swift) have taken a step in the right direction to reduce accidents - it's painful because it requires correcting long-standing horrifically-wrong habits.