23 Nov
2016
23 Nov
'16
7:10 a.m.
I agree, but using string(8bit) to mean "binary data" is something that's 100% backward compatible.
It would not be backwards compatible, since that is not what string(8bit) means today.
Unicode text would always be referred to as string(21bit), even if it happens to contain nothing but Latin-1 characters.
That doesn't really make sense. So you say that "R\xe4ksm\xf6rg\xe5s" would have type string(21bit)? What type would "\U12345678" have? What type would "Foo" have? How would you specify a UTF-8 encoded literal?