DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

surrogateescape means that code like print(*os.listdir()) can throw a UnicodeEncodeError. The programmer has to manually keep track of which values of the 'str' type are really Unicode and will work with all the standard string functions, and which are nearly-Unicode but will occasionally throw if you try to print or encode them like normal strings. It might be the best hack that's possible in Python given its compatibility constraints, but I think it creates as many problems as it solves. A statically typed language should be able to do better - tracking this kind of information about the range of values is what type systems are for.

At least if you get it wrong in Python, you'll probably just get an exception. In a non-memory-safe language, some code might rely on the promise that strings are Unicode and violating that could cause undefined behaviour; you need to either strictly enforce that promise, or not make the promise at all.