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I can't think of many languages that differentiate between #1 and #2 in your list. And languages that differentiate between #1 and #3 generally don't refer to #1 as "strings" at all, so you still have a single definitive notion of what a string is (and some other things that are emphatically not strings).



Yeah, a bunch of languages don't strongly differentiate between all three of these.

For example, C++ differentiates between #1 and #2 (although it has woefully inadequate out-of-box support for #3).

Python (> 3) calls #1 bytes / bytearray, and calls #3 string. #2 is only really supported for FFI with C (i.e. ctypes.c_char_p and friends)




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