Prothon should not borrow Python strings!

[Paul Prescod]

I skimmed the tutorial and something alarmed me.

"Strings are a powerful data type in Prothon. Unlike many languages, 
they can be of unlimited size (constrained only by memory size) and can 
hold any arbitrary data, even binary data such as photos and movies.They 
are of course also good for their traditional role of storing and 
manipulating text."

This view of strings is about a decade out of date with modern 
programmimg practice. From the programmer's point of view, a string 
should be a list of characters. Characters are logical objects that have 
properties defined by Unicode. This is the model used by Java, 
Javascript, XML and C#.

Characters are an extremely important logical concept for human beings 
(computers are supposed to serve human beings!) and they need 
first-class representation. It is an accident of history that the 
language you grew up with has so few characters that they can have a 
one-to-one correspondance with bytes.

I can understand why you might be afraid to tackle all of Unicode for 
version 1.0. Don't bother. All you need to do today to avoid the dead 
end is DO NOT ALLOW BINARY DATA IN STRINGS. Have a binary data type. 
Have a character string type. Give them a common "prototype" if you 
wish. Let them share methods. But keep them separate in your code. The 
result of reading a file is a binary data string. The result of parsing 
an XML file is a character string. These are as different as the bits 
that represent an integer in a particular file format and a logical integer.

Even if your character data type is today limited to characters between 
0 and 255, you can easily extend that later. But once you have megabytes 
of code that makes no distinction between characters and bytes it will 
be too late. It would be like trying to tease apart integers and floats 
after having treated them as indistinguishable. (which brings me to my 
next post)

  Paul Prescod