allow to have char type and ASCII strings in GDScript

[azur-wolve]

GDScript has no char fundamental type:
var letter: char = 'c'

Also has no 1-byte (8-bit) strings, for economical text.

Probably if such are needed, it is expected to have them by using another lang that supports them.

However what do you think?
Would you prefer have them for being able to use only GDScript as much as possible, or find it unnecessary?

[Calinou]

Also has no 1-byte (8-bit) strings, for economical text.

There's PackedByteArray (PoolByteArray in 3.x), which you can use for this purpose. It's limited to storing ASCII text only, so it's not very friendly in an age of Unicode and internationalization.

That said, it's unlikely that memory usage will ever be a limiting factor when writing game logic.

[Mickeon]

I can see 8-bit Strings potentially being useful internally (for example I see lot of names in the ClassDB already use just a few letters and characters to be identified anyway), but I feel like for the average Godot user exposing something like this wouldn't be necessary, nowadays at least.

[dalexeev]

You can use int and String.unicode_at() instead. I used this approach in my plugin to optimize a parser. I'm not sure it makes sense to add char type and/or char literals, but we could return the ord() function. It would be evaluated at compile time if you passed a constant argument. See godotengine/godot#77164.