I seem to have rather little use for the cases the author presents here. If I'm working with strings, they are either of the debug or internal variant, where ev

I seem to have rather little use for the cases the author presents here. If I'm working with strings, they are either of the debug or internal variant, where even basic ASCII would suffice, or I get them from somewhere and don't touch them at all, just pass them around. But what I absolutely need in a language is to have a very very clear seperation between strings and byte arrays, or raw data, and ideally a way to transform between the two. C# gets this right with its byte and string types, the framework uses them correctly, and there is the wonderful Encoding namespace to interchange the two. Python 2.7 is the absolte worst, it's apparently impossible to get anything done with raw data and not run into some obscure 'ASCII codec can't handle octet 128' whatever exception (reminds you why we have strict typing: magic is fucking annoying).