Consider removing overloaded byte array APIs #55
Description
AccessExpressions should be composed solely of printable characters that are human-readable. The library might benefit from making the APIs enforce stronger types for what it accepts when constructing its own objects.
This stronger typing would probably result in simpler implementation and less API bloat, working entirely with characters, and not having to worry about encoding or conversion within the library. However, in order to use the library this way, users who currently store their access expressions as byte arrays, may be forced to convert them to Strings for evaluation, and that may be undesirable for performance reasons (though perhaps not really that bad, and may not be noticeable at all with caching).
It's not clear to me at this time what those performance differences and the full extent of the trade-offs would be, but I think this is worth at least some investigation, since having a clean API with strong types out the gate for a new library will bode well for this library's longevity.