Racket does this too. In Racket, "this is a string, which is a sequence of characters" #"this is a bytestring, a sequence of numbers between 0 and 255

Racket does this too. In Racket, "this is a string, which is a sequence of characters" #"this is a bytestring, a sequence of numbers between 0 and 255" You can convert back and forth with string->bytes/utf-8 or bytes->string/utf-8, substituting utf-8 for whichever character encoding you want. You can use functions like string-ref, which returns a unicode character and bytes-ref, which returns an integer. Functions like string-normalize-nfc (or -nfd or -nfkc or etc) will normalize combining characters, and you can capitalize uppercase/lowercase strings according to locale, etc. Read from an input port with read-bytes and read-string, and writing to an output port works similarly. Racket does does a great job keeping these things as explicit as they should be.