Java made the decision to use String as an abstraction
for many OS-specific objects, like filenames (or environment variables).
Most of the time this works fine, but occasionally you can notice
that the underlying OS (in the case of Unix) actually uses
arbitrary byte arrays as filenames.
It would
Sorry if this is the wrong list for this question. I tried asking it
on comp.lang.java, but didn't get very far there.
I've been wanting to expand my horizons a bit by taking one of my
programs and rewriting it into a number of other languages. It
started life in python, and I've recoded it into
