[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.