What's unacceptable is forcing the programmer to deal with the possibility of 'garbage' strings by default. Also having major issues when half of the libraries

What's unacceptable is forcing the programmer to deal with the possibility of 'garbage' strings by default. Also having major issues when half of the libraries want 'binary string like sequences' and the other half want 'native Unicode strings'. That's what the support for a generic array type, which MIGHT be handled like a string (if the programmer chooses), and which when designated as being in a Unicode format of ANY type, and processed with data of any valid Unicode type, will automatically coerce together the correct way, and produce a valid result* (assuming valid inputs, and which might still need to actually be validated (again, bitflag cleared), if anyone cares). THAT is what a high level language should be. Python has actually __REGRESSED__ in that respect. It's handing of Unicode is //low// level. It forces the programmer to need to care about the data types, and deal with legacy invalid data strings in some method that's up to them. Except they can't /ignore/ invalid sequences, because that option isn't supported.