4 ms·

Splitting into ASCII-only and Unicode would be more of a regression than a progression. And yes, the “I’m not a native speaker” is a typical pre-emptive reply,

• tsimionescu 3y ago
  Let me give an example of why I don't think a single unified string API works. When doing (stringA == stringB) , what do you expect to get as a result? Do you expect it to tell if you the two strings represent the exact same codepoints, or do you expect it to tell you whether they represent the same Unicode grapheme clusters, as Unicode recommends? The answer is of course both, depending on context. You certainly don't want a fuzzy match when, say, decoding a protobuf, but you also don't want a codepoint match when looking up user input. What most modern languages have settled on is having a Unicode codepoint array type, typically called string or text, and an array of bytes type. However, common string operations are often only provided for the text type, and not the bytes type - which becomes very annoying when doing low level work and using bytes for text, and hoping for simple text operations.