We don't need a string type (2013)
TL;DR : Characters and Strings considered harmful.<p>And he&#x27;s right, they totally are ! (Also, &#x27;string&#x27; can mean an ordered sequence of similar objects of any kind, not just characters.)<p>But (as these discussions also mention) replacing them by much more clearly defined concepts like byte arrays, codepoints, glyphs, grapheme clusters and text fields is only the first step...<p>The big question (these days) is what to do with text, specifically the &#x27;code&#x27; kind of text (either programming or markup, and poor separation between &#x27;plain&#x27; text and code keeps causing security issues).<p>To start with, even code needs formatting, specifically some way to signal a new line, or it will end up unreadable.<p>Then, code can&#x27;t be just arbitrary Unicode text, some limits have to apply, because Unicode can get verrrry &#x27;fancy&#x27; !  
(Arbitrary Unicode is fine in text fields and comments embedded in code.)<p>So, I&#x27;m curious, is there any Unicode normalization specifically designed for code ? (If not, why, and which is the closest one ?)<p>I&#x27;m thinking of Python (3), which has what seems to be a somewhat arbitrary list of what can and what can&#x27;t be used as a variable name ? (And the language itself seemingly only uses ASCII, though this shouldn&#x27;t be a restriction for programming&#x2F;markup languages !)<p>Also I hear that Julia goes much further than that (with even (La)TeX-like shortcuts for characters that might not be available on some keyboards), what kind of &#x27;normalization&#x27; have they adopted ?