I am writing an l-system evaluator, and have explained the concept to non-programmer friends of mine several times now. I've found myself explaining the concept of "strings" over and over, so I've switched to calling it "text" in those situations.

As a reasonably experienced programmer, however, this terminology makes me uncomfortable. To me, "text" implies a sequence of words written in a human language, rather than a sequence of arbitrary characters. It hints at structure which may not be present in a string.

I like the distinction made by Haskell:

- A Byte (AKA Word8) is 8 bits. It has no inherent meaning.

- A Character (AKA Char) is a Unicode code point.

- A ByteString is a sequence of Bytes. It has no inherent meaning.

- A Text (AKA String) is a sequence of Chars.

In particular, Char != Byte and String != ByteString; we can juggle bytes without having to care about encodings; and we can manipulate text without having to care about its representation.

Definitely appreciate how careful Haskell is about the distinction: it's where I first started having these thoughts!