Speaking of Python, my ideal variant would:

# be whitespace insensitive (add back the braces and an official linter to use ANY kind of standard convention for enforcing a 'look')

# (Mostly un-do the external changes of Python 3 back to 2, BUT align to UTF8 rather than some 16 format)

# and would also handle all forms of 'strings' like C (though not necessarily null terminated, it'd be the array length + array style)

# with some added pre-tags that MAY be used to track if it's known to be in a given encoding.

# Validation/translation to such an encoding would be done only if requested and by a sub-library. Such encodings might include: Validated-UTF8-NFC, Validated-UTF8-NFKD, Mixed-UTF8, Tainted-UTF8... The Mixed variant would be the result of combining two UTF8 strings normalized to different standards, while the tainted one would be applied if the string is combined with, modified / returned from a function not known to be Unicode safe.

# File handles and other external I/O could also be opened without an encoding or explicitly with a binary encoding to allow raw binary access, and with an encoding to cause a final coercion to the desired encoding on output (and validation on input).

# Ref: https://unicode.org/reports/tr15/#Norm_Forms