Hah, then I grok your initial reaction better. :)<p>There is actually a class in Perl 6, called Buf, for when you want to talk about a sequence of bytes rather than a sequence of characters/graphemes. Buf is array-indexable; in fact it works a little like a string a little like an array. It's there to make it harder to screw encodings up. See <a href="http://use.perl.org/~masak/journal/39236" rel="nofollow">http://use.perl.org/~masak/journal/39236</a> for how.