So? Even if we accept your myopic list of features that work and believe your statement that "most operations can be performed on bytes", that doesn't make the

So? Even if we accept your myopic list of features that work and believe your statement that "most operations can be performed on bytes", that doesn't make the language usable for internationalized content. Trading having to call encode and decode, which fail with clear, easy-to-fix errors, for a myriad of subtle, silent encoding failures is not a good trade. Which you would be abundantly clear to you if you had internationalized anything ever.