Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by taneq 2233 days ago
I think all of this just highlights (hah) that the way we think of human-language strings needs to change. They're not a stream of characters, they're their own thing with complex semantic rules. They should be represented as an opaque blob only manipulated via an API or passed to an OS for rendering etc.

Machine-readable strings can still just be an ASCII byte array, but we need to keep the two separate.