Strings should be interfaces

Proposed: The basic data types of a programming language should be interfaces, the standard library should work on interfaces, and the low-level data types should be implementations of the basic interface.

The php devs spent years trying to convert their default string type from ascii to unicode before giving up. Golang shits a brick if you try to convert between a string and a []byte without an explicit cast. Consider instead that every function were written to operate on a string interface rather than a string data type, and we let the compiler and optimizer figure out what to do with whatever is passed into the function. []byte can implement the string interface. The programmer can send the standard string functions data in any charset (korean, japanese, whatever) and it will just work because a string of any charset will implement the string interface.

Another use case: You read some numbers as an integer. It could be a bigint or a small int. You don't care until you need to store it again. Performance and storage do not matter, you just need some math or a comparison to work. You write your code to work on an "int" interface and let the compiler figure out how to implement it.