Sure, but the list of symbols can be an arbitrary collection where the symbols are 0 and 1. Voila, now your 'string' is 'binary data' not 'text'. Parsing bina

Sure, but the list of symbols can be an arbitrary collection where the symbols are 0 and 1. Voila, now your 'string' is 'binary data' not 'text'. Parsing binary data is my bread and butter, so I might be biased but: it works fine. Anything which comes over the wire is a string, anything which comes out of store is a string. If you're using something like protobufs, that's great, because having to marshal/serialize/parse along every process boundary is expensive and probably unnecessary. But at some point, and anywhere on the 'surface' of the system, data has to be un-flattened into a shape. That's parsing.