I like the distinction made by Haskell: - A Byte (AKA Word8) is 8 bits. It has no inherent meaning. - A Character (AKA Char) is a Unicode code point. - A Byt

I like the distinction made by Haskell: - A Byte (AKA Word8) is 8 bits. It has no inherent meaning. - A Character (AKA Char) is a Unicode code point. - A ByteString is a sequence of Bytes. It has no inherent meaning. - A Text (AKA String) is a sequence of Chars. In particular, Char != Byte and String != ByteString; we can juggle bytes without having to care about encodings; and we can manipulate text without having to care about its representation.