[dotancohen]

You win on the string replace, that was a bad example. Try a regex replace! But I will also mention that seeing properly indented code with clear identifier names is refreshing where I work!

> Why not indeed? What a great idea.

It sounded to me that you were arguing that string manipulation functions do not need to be included in modern programming languages. You said: "don't decode to a string, and do all your character manipulation on the bytes"

[falsedan]

OK, I see how what I said could mean that. What I meant was: if using the language's internal string representation gives poor performance/resource usage, better to avoid it and directly manipulate the undecoded bytes. Most languages allow you to control when loaded data is converted to strings; simply don't convert it, and uh reimplement stdlib functions to work with your preferred encoding.