Well there are no strings, only byte arrays. Now that's fine if you only pass bytes around in a stream, but if wan't to do any computation it you have to assume

Well there are no strings, only byte arrays. Now that's fine if you only pass bytes around in a stream, but if wan't to do any computation it you have to assume an encoding and basically anything outside of straight ASCII will be a pain. Now you may argue that this can be handled nicely in the standard library without changing the language. This is correct, but there will be some frictions with string litterals.