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If you're merely passing the data, sure. But the scenario I described was specifically displaying data. For the terminal, your approach would only work if the expected encoding of the filename is the same as the output encoding of the terminal - which is not always the case. But then there's also GUI etc.

Ultimately, some bit of code (e.g. the terminal emulator) will still need to interpret that filename as a string in order to display it as one - and if it's not really a string, it won't be able to do that properly. Filenames are part of the UX - the filesystem a user-facing artifact, not an implementation detail - so they have to be constrained in such ways that make sense for humans, even if arrays of octets would do just fine as unique IDs.



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