I guess I'm enjoying thinking of characters/strings/whatever in the same way I think of a media stream. I don't reason about media streams in my general programming, but when I need to do so I use a specialized, application-specific library--the language isn't built with any preconceived notion of what music is, or an image, or video. I like a minimal (if even that) built-in notion of what char/text is. I like Arc (so far) and I do hope it avoids premature textualization for a very long time:-)
