>Right, and that's something that can't be done in the current
>standard. Hence this entire proposal has to wait until some major
>changes can be done.
Yup. And then those changes should not be a repurposing of an
existing mechanism (element ranges on the string type) but something
more appropriate for the goals.
>In Python, it's done with a prefix - u"asdf" is a Unicode string, and
>b"asdf" is a byte string.
Since nominally strings are Unicode (with the extended ISO 10646
range) strings now, I think "asdf" can be left as the syntax for that,
and we only need a new syntax for the byte string ("buffer") type. We
can also look at Java, which has byte[] as the type for byte strings,
requiring literals like {'a','s','d','f'}, but I would like to see
something a bit more convenient to use. :-)
