I like that they ARE buckets of bytes on Unixen. As an analogy take the common text file. Would you like it if the read() and write() system calls looked at th

I like that they ARE buckets of bytes on Unixen. As an analogy take the common text file. Would you like it if the read() and write() system calls looked at the file extension and refused to write non-ASCII or non-Unicode into it? I would not like that. The flexibility to do whatever I want with those bytes is more important than guaranteeing correct text encoding. If someone wants that for their system, make the user software do it, not the kernel.