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Names are not strings. Until software developers get that through their heads, the situation is going to stay broken.

I consulted on a project for a US-based airline. The horror show that is Sabre infests everything, and Sabre doesn't understand any character that didn't exist in six-bit BCD

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> Names are not strings.

So what are they?

Strings are a primitive type. Names are not strings in the same way Dates are not strings. They can be implemented, represented, and printed as strings, but they have behaviors and meaning that the primitive string type does not.

To use another example, a binary tree is not an array, although it can be implemented using an array.

Money is not a floating point value, and woe to the programmer that tries to use float for money.

There are international standards for representing dates, but none exist for names. Names do not abide by any scheme or set of rules, therefore the only appropriate data structure for storing names is a unicode string. Anything else will exclude people.

Point me to the international standards for representing money.

ISO 4217

TIL

Without making assumptions about the origin of the name, you can't impute any structure onto that string, can you? In that case, it is still simply a string.

> making assumptions

We have i18n to give context, no assumptions needed.

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