I'm with you here; but in that case, I'd like an ascii_string type, which most languages don't provide specifically. This type _would_ support string reversal, substring slices, and so on, but be limited to 7-bit ASCII only. I think there are many use cases that are purely internal, and don't need i8n. It's handy to be able to do things, including operations on strings, for internal things. Filename handling where you control the filename, the "keys" in languages which use strings for a dictionary type, and so forth.
I think this might just confuse new programmers and the filename thing is especially dangerous since at some point you might want to support i18n there. I think it would be better to have two types of string: 1) unicode strings and 2) arrays of 8 byte data with some string like functions (essentially C strings). The second case is essentially binary data strings.
