[pjmlp]

OCaml fits the bill.

[jabl]

Yeah, or Haskell.

But those have been out there in a more or less mature form for decades, with no major uptake in sight. I guess they're just too esoteric for them to reach critical mass. So here I am, stuck with bash/python/C, and dabbling a bit with Rust..

[pjmlp]

If you would like to work in finance or compiler development, there is enough uptake of ML derived languages.

[swiley]

OCaml definitely has some weirdness that come from its age though (char==byte thing for example.)

[pjmlp]

Yeah there are some quirks, but that wasn't part of OP's request.

[jabl]

Well, I did specify "modern", which arguably includes sane Unicode handling.

I think a reasonable compromise is to have "char" be a 32 bit type, whereas a "string" would be UTF8.

[pjmlp]

Not sure if I would call string handling in Swift sane, but to each its own.