unfortunately I do have an idea and it's very sad :( I can only hope that one day one of the mainstream programming languages doesn't include them at all...
For JS users with "One size fits all VM", strings are like food and water. Not sure if typed languages have any replacement for strings, may be a strictly typed Unicode string is only alternative.
typed languages have always used replacements for strings. For example, Windows and most other software used to return an error code that had to be looked up in the error table to understand. Modern examples of getting rid of strings is use of embeddings - fortunately in ML nobody thinks that using strings is a good idea, so they are always transformed into vectors ;) This was always possible in the past and hopefully it will be more common in the future.
"developers love strings and always find ways to abuse them" - OMG you are so right, you have no idea ;)
unfortunately I do have an idea and it's very sad :( I can only hope that one day one of the mainstream programming languages doesn't include them at all...
For JS users with "One size fits all VM", strings are like food and water. Not sure if typed languages have any replacement for strings, may be a strictly typed Unicode string is only alternative.
typed languages have always used replacements for strings. For example, Windows and most other software used to return an error code that had to be looked up in the error table to understand. Modern examples of getting rid of strings is use of embeddings - fortunately in ML nobody thinks that using strings is a good idea, so they are always transformed into vectors ;) This was always possible in the past and hopefully it will be more common in the future.